Get paid up to $40,000 for finding ways to hack Facebook or Instagram accounts

Now you can get paid up to $40,000 for finding and responsibly
reporting critical vulnerabilities in the websites and mobile
applications owned by Facebook that could allow cyber attackers to
take over user accounts.

In the latest post published Tuesday on the Facebook page, the
social networking giant announced that it has raised the monetary
reward for account takeover vulnerabilities to encourage security
researchers and bug bounty hunters in helping Facebook to fix high
impact issues before nefarious hackers exploit them.

The announcement says:

Cybersecurity researchers who find security vulnerabilities in
any products owned by Facebook, including Instagram,
WhatsApp, and 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 reward—if user interaction is not required at all
• $25,000 reward—if minimum user interaction is required

“We encourage researchers to share their proof of concept reports
with us without having to also discover bypasses for Facebook
defense mechanisms,” Facebook said^[1].

“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.”

In recent years Facebook has paid out millions of dollars to
white hat hackers under its bug bounty program for reporting flaws
in its services and helping the company fix them.

The move apparently comes in response to a recent massive data
breach in Facebook that allowed attackers to gather personal
information of around 30 million Facebook
users^[2] using stolen access
tokens by exploiting a
zero-day vulnerability^[3]
in its “View As” feature.

If you find any vulnerability in Facebook-owned platforms,
report it to the company through its bug bounty
program^[4].

2018 has been quite a terrible year for Facebook with the most
significant revelation being the Cambridge Analytic
scandal^[5] that exposed personal
data of 87 million Facebook users.

The social network also suffered its worst-ever security breach
in September that exposed highly sensitive data of
14 million users^[6].

In June, the company suffered another issue affecting 14 million
users^[7], wherein users’ posts
that were meant to be private became public.

These incidents came out to be a failure of the
company in keeping the information of its 2.2 billion
users protected while generating billions of dollars in revenue
from the same information.
^[8][9]