Here’s why Facebook gave this 20-year old hacker from Kerala Rs 10.70 lakh

Arun S Kumar is not your ordinary 20-year-old. The computer engineering student at the MES Institute of Technology and Management in Chathannoor, Kerala is also a proficient hacker who just received a reward of Rs 10.70 lakh ($16,000) from social networking giant Facebook after he found vulnerability in their code.

He received the monetary award under Facebook’s bug bounty programme that the social networking website site started in 2011. Under this programme, people who notify Facebook of flaws on its website are given a reward.

Arun detected the critical bug in Facebook Business Manager on August 29. This vulnerability would allow a hacker to take control over Facebook in less than 10 seconds. It would allow a hacker to manipulate the page of any Facebook user.



He immediately reported it to the Facebook security team who responded to him the next day saying how his discovery helped them prevent a massive security breach. Following his warning, Facebook’s security team fixed the bug by September 6 and mailed Arun three days later informing him about the reward.

Interestingly, this is not the first time Arun has hunted bugs. In the past, he has had detected numerous bugs in Google and Facebook. Infact, Facebook had paid him a Rs 7 lakh bounty in April this year. In August, they had invited him for a meeting with its security members at Las Vegas along with three other hackers from different countries. He was also awarded the tenth place in the Facebook's hall of fame of the white hat hackers. He is the only Indian to be honoured in the website's hall of fame.

In the last three years, the young hacker has managed to amass approximately Rs 30 lakhs in payouts for hunting down bugs.