Love to hack? well, Facebook is paying up to $40,000 to any person who will be able to find critical vulnerabilities in their websites and mobile application which will allow the full takeover of a user account.
According to the social networking giant, the challenge also includes other Facebook products such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Facebook explained that it had raised the monetary reward for account takeover vulnerabilities to encourage security researchers and bug hunters in helping Facebook to fix vulnerabilities before it falls into the wrong hands as seen with the September massive data breach.
"Today, to encourage security researchers to work on finding high impact issues, we are increasing the average payout for account takeover bugs," Facebook said. "Our goal is to ensure that these vulnerabilities such as the one disclosed in September are reported to us in the most responsible and timely manner."
Cybersecurity researchers who find vulnerabilities in any of Facebook's owned Instagram, WhatsApp or Oculus, "that can lead to a full account takeover, including access tokens leakage or the ability to access users' valid sessions will be rewarded an average bounty of:"
- $40,000 if the user interaction is not required at all, or
- $25,00 if minimum user interaction is required.
Over the years, Facebook has paid out millions of dollars to bug hinter under its bug bounty program. The company hopes that by increasing the reward for the bug bounty program, bug hunters and white hackers will be encouraged to search for bugs, and as well help secure the 2 billion users account on its platform.
"By increasing the award for account takeover vulnerabilities and decreasing the technical overhead necessary to be eligible for bug bounty, we hope to encourage an even larger number of high quality submissions from our existing and new white hat researchers to help us secure over 2 billion users," Facebook said.
Facebook have been heavily criticized for its failure to ensure safety of her users data. The social media giant has suffered many data breaches, with the worst being the Cambridge Analytic scandal that exposed personal data of about 87 million Facebook users.
The social media giant also suffered another data breach this year which led to the exposure of highly sensitive data of 14 million users.
Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg will face an intense grilling from a 7-nation committee over the social network's frequent data breaches and scandals.