10-Year-Old Kid Wins $10,000 for Successfully Hacking Instagram

There are a bunch of ways to make money through Instagram: you can sell prints, attract potential clients, you can even set up an account for your pooch. But one 10-year-old in Finnish kid squeezed $10K out of Instagram without having to post a single photo… he hacked the platform instead.

The prize was awarded to “Jani” (no last name given), a 10-year-old Finn, as part of Facebook’s bug bounty program. Facebook offers payouts to anybody who can uncover serious security vulnerabilities in their apps, and Jani recently became the youngest person to ever win this bounty after uncovering a bug that let him delete any message on Instagram.

“I would have been able to eliminate anyone, even Justin Bieber,” he told Finnish publication Iltalehti.

Facebook didn’t take Jani at his word. Once he reported the hack, the social network challenged him to delete something on a test account back in February… which he promptly did. By March, a $10,000 check was in his hands. A pretty auspicious start for a 10-year-old who learned his hacking skills from YouTube.

The irony is that Jani isn’t even old enough to have his own Instagram account… but maybe that’s not a bad thing. He told that same Finnish publication that he would be spending the money on football and a new bike.

(via Forbes)