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Lakshman Muthiyah, a web developer from Devankottai, is rewarded by Facebook rewarded an amount of $12,500 (about Rs 7.8 lakh) for spotting a bug. He alerted Facebook of the issue on February 10. "After reviewing the issue you have reported, we have decided to award you a bounty of $12,500," Facebook told him in an email the same day.

Facebook, India said that, after the US, has the most number of people trying to sniff out cyber vulnerabilities in Facebook such as weak data security and cross scripting, followed by the UK, Turkey and Germany. The company, under its bug bounty program, has rewarded 329 people in the past two years, the payouts adding up to more than $1 million. In 2013, Arul Kumar, a graduate of Hindustan Institute of Technology, Coimbatore, alerted Facebook to a similar weakness that could be used to delete user albums without consent. He, too, was rewarded $12,500.

Muthiyah explained on his blog how he discovered the vulnerability in the Facebook. Facebook apps use Graph API software to read and write user data. Each time a person uses Facebook to run a task - such as to access an app or change a photograph - this software generates a `token' for it. Muthiyah, hunting for a bug, tried to delete his own photo album using one such token and when that did not work, he found that by inserting another kind of token - used to access Facebook on Android - he could easily delete any user's album by merely entering its unique tag.

By Premji