Facebook pays ten-year-old hacker $10k

Facebook has welcomed its youngest hacker yet, and they're paying them a fortune.

A ten-year-old from Finland pointed out to the company that he could delete any comment on the photo sharing app, Instagram, without even being signed into an account.

Normally people can only delete the comments that they themselves have posted, but there was an issue with the site's interface, and the ten-year-old caught it.

He reported the issue to Facebook, who own Instagram, and they set up a test account and told him to prove it.

The boy told Finland's Iltalehti newspaper: "I wanted to see if Instagram's comment field could stand malicious code. Turns out it couldn't."

According to NBC News the bug was fixed in February and the young Fin was paid $10,000 through Facebook's 'Bug Bounty' program.

This is a service the site started back in 2011 and since then they've paid out more than $4 million to nearly 1,000 people around the world.

Facebook have been known to refuse payouts to hackers that are known to have violated the company's terms and conditions.

This latest case is especially unusual given that the hacker isn't technically old enough to have an Instagram account - but because he didn't need to sign into an account, this wasn't an issue!

Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 and the corporation also owns messaging giant Whatsapp.