10-Year-Old Becomes Facebook's Youngest Bounty Hunter

When I was a kid, I always thought that being a bounty hunter or a smuggler would be a cool profession. Of course, in my mind, I was thinking that I'd be Boba Fett, or Han Solo. In reality, those titles are far different than they're depicted in the Star Wars universe. But that doesn't make it any less interesting when a 10-year-old can claim to be the youngest bounty hunter ever.

A young boy in Finland named Jani recently received a $10,000 reward from Facebook through their bug bounty hunting program, which makes him the youngest person to do so. In fact, he's so young that he's not technically even allowed to use Instagram, the service where he found the bug that earned him the big payout.

So what did the boy do to find the bug? Here's what he did, in his own words (translation provided by The Guardian).

"I tested whether the comments section of Instagram can handle harmful code. Turns out it can't. I noticed that I can delete other people's comments from there. I could have deleted anyone's—like Justin Bieber's, for example—comments."

Don't worry, Facebook responded to his findings very quickly, and has since patched the vulnerability. As for Jani, he received his payout back in March, and said that his plans for the money include a football and a new bicycle.