You can now get paid up to $40,000 if you manage to discover and report critical vulnerabilities in Facebookthat could allow cyber attackers to compromise user accounts.
Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has increased the reward it offers for finding vulnerabilities, in order to encourage security researchers and the “bug hunters”, to help the social media platform fix these issues before malicious hackers exploit them.
The announcement says:
“Researchers in cyberspace who discover security vulnerabilities in products belonging to Facebook, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, which can lead to a full account compromise, including credential leaks, will be rewarded as follows:
Reward $40,000, if user interaction is not required at all
Reward $25,000, if minimal user interaction is required
"We encourage researchers to share evidence of bugs with us, without having to discover additional workarounds for Facebook's defenses," Facebook said
“With the increase of the bounty for vulnerabilities and the reduction of the technical requirements that are necessary to assess them, we hope to encourage an even larger number of high‑quality submissions from existing and new white hat researchers, who will help us secure over 2 billion users .”
In recent years Facebook has spent millions of dollars on white hat hackers within its bug bounty program, to report vulnerabilities in its services and provide assistance to the company in resolving them.
The move apparently comes as a response to a recent massive data breach on Facebook that allowed attackers to collect personal information of about 30 million Facebook users using stolen access credentials, exploiting a zero‑day vulnerability in the “View As” feature.
If you discover a vulnerability in the platforms owned by Facebook, report it to the company through the bug bounty program.
In 2018 it was a very bad year for Facebook, with the most significant revelation being the Cambridge Analytica scandal that leaked the personal data of 87 million Facebook users.
The social network also suffered the worst security breach in September, which exposed sensitive data of 14 million users.
In June, the company faced another issue that affected 14 million users, where posts intended to be private were made public.
These incidents resulted in the company's failure to keep the personal information of its 2.2 billion users protected, while it generates billions of dollars in revenue from the same information.
