A young man from India, KS Ananthakrishna, a student at Pathanamthitta Mount Zion College of Engineering, received an award from Facebook, as he managed to fix a bug in the WhatsApp, which allowed third parties to completely remove files without the user's knowledge.
According to the report, Ananthakrishna received a cash prize of $500 (approximately Rs 34,000) and Facebook also promised him a place in its Hall of Fame. In addition, his name is featured at the 80thposition in Facebook's thanks list this year.
The bug reported by Ananthakrishna can cause memory corruption. It allows trackers to delete or completely wipe a victim's data. What makes the spyware even more dangerous is that the majority of the information on the affected device, including phone call logs, contacts, messages, emails, and photos, is exposed to hackers. Ananthakrishna reported the issue to Facebook in March and was awarded the award for it in May, and the social networking company fixed the bug after he reported it.
The young man from India is a cybersecurity enthusiast and this is not the first time that his skills in this field have been recognized, since a year and a half ago Google also included him in its thanksgiving reports. In that case, he had also discovered a bug in the platform and while he did not receive an award for this discovery, he did receive an honorable mention.
In his spare time, he works as a volunteer at the Kerala Police CyberDome, a technology research and development center of the Kerala Police. He is also involved in research into ethical hacking and the potential of the internet, and has also worked as an independent consultant for private companies.
