Facebook Awarded A 22-YO Engineer $5,000 For WhatsApp Bug Discovery

Recently, Facebook has awarded a man from Manipur after his discovery of a bug in WhatsApp that violated a user’s privacy.

A Surprising Discovery

At 22 years of age, Zonel Sougaijam is currently a civil engineer. To reward his discovery of a WhatsApp bug, Facebook has awarded him an incredible amount of $5,000. In addition, the media giant put him in their “Hall of Fame” this year.

At the moment, Sougaijam's name now ranks 16^th among 93 others in the list for “ Facebook Hall of Fame 2019”.

Bug explanation

Regarding the bug, Sougaijam did have a quick explanation for PTI. According to the 22-year-old boy, in a WhatsApp voice call, the bug suddenly upgraded the original voice call into a video call. However, it doesn’t let the receiver know about this.

No user authorization or knowledge from the receiver’s end, the caller could then have access to the receiver’s screen. That being said, the caller could see what’s the person was up to, thus violating the receiver’s privacy.

Response from Facebook

Back to Sougaijam, after detecting the bug, he immediately reported it to Facebook’s Bug Bounty Program, in March. The program was there to handle cases of privacy violation similar to this bug.

According to Sougaijam, the team at Facebook Security acknowledged his report quickly the following day. After that, the technical department went on to fix the bug in about 15 to 20 days.

In an email from Facebook to Sougaijam, the company decided to reward the young engineer a staggering $5,000 bounty. In addition, Sougaijam can find his name and place in the Hall of Fame the same month he made the discovery.

For your information, Facebook purchased WhatsApp way back in 2014. As the CEO of the company, in February that year, Mark Zuckerberg bought the popular messaging service for $19 billion.