A Manipuri Engineer Gets Into 'Facebook Hall Of Fame' For Discovering A Fatal Bug

An Indian civil engineer has been rewarded a whopping Rs. 3,47,000 for detecting a bug of Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp. The man in the story is Zonel Sougajiam, who is 22 years old and comes from Manipur, also said that his contribution for Facebook made him get into “Facebook Hall of Fame 2019”.

For more information, Zonel discovered a bug that could be a fatal flaw for the privacy of users. According to him, the bug will let the caller switch his calling session to a video call even when the receiver has no consent about that. Therefore, it’s visible for that caller to track whatever his friend is doing without the authorization and knowledge of him, so it was able to violate the receiver’s privacy. That's what Sougaijam has disclosed about in an interview with PTI.

Zonel Sogaijam then proposed his report of the bug to Facebook in March. After reviewing the issue, the Bug Bounty Program, a Facebook’s arm that is set to deal with any matters related to privacy, had decided to award him an estimated Rs. 3,47,000 as a bounty. Sougaijam claimed that the company’s security team has acknowledged the problem just after a few days he sent the report and has been working on fixing the problem within about 15 days.

After that, Sougaijam found another award is being honored in the company’s “Hall of Fame”. Thanks to his dedicated contribution to the tech giant’s product, Zonel is holding the 16^th position in this year's “Hall of Fame” page, of which there are a total of 94 people who have made up the list this year. The annual list is built to name all contributors for making responsible disclosure in all platforms owned by the tech giant, including WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger.