Facebook pays $40,000 for security loopholes

Facebook has spent $40,000 in the first 21 days of a program that rewards the discovery of security bugs, the BBC News reported.

The bug bounty program aims to encourage security researchers to help harden Facebook against attack.

One security researcher has been rewarded with more than $7,000 for finding six serious bugs in the social networking site.

The program runs alongside Facebook's efforts to police the code it creates that keeps the social site running.

A blog post by Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan revealed some information about the early days of the bug bounty program.

He said the program had made Facebook more secure by introducing the networking site to "novel attack vectors, and helping us improve lots of corners in our code".

The minimum amount paid for a bug is $500, said Sullivan, up to a maximum of $5000 for the most serious loopholes. The maximum bounty has already been paid once, he said.

Many cyber criminals and vandals have targeted Facebook in many different ways to extract useful information from people, promote spam or fake goods.

Sullivan said Facebook had internal bug-hunting teams, used external auditors to vet its code and ran "bug-a-thons" to hunt out mistakes but it regularly received reports about glitches from independent security researchers.

Facebook set up a system to handle these reports in 2010 which promised not to take legal action against those that find bugs and gave it chance to assess them.

Paying those that report problems was the logical next step for the disclosure system, he said.