Indian Coders Lead Race In Eliminating Facebook Bugs

Indian software engineers and researchers are leading in a Facebook's drive to wipe out bugs from the social networking website.

India, which is home to Facebook’s second largest userbase, accounted for the largest share of Facebook’s bug bounty programme in the first six months of this year, ahead of the US and Mexico.

The US company paid $611,741 to 149 researchers between January-June as part of the programme. In March, Facebook had said it had paid Rs 4.84 crore to Indian researchers, the most paid till then by the US-based firm.

“We received more than 9,000 reports in the first half of 2016... The top three countries based on the number of payouts were India, the US and Mexico,” Facebook said in a blogpost.

Under the bug bounty programme, which was launched in 2011, Facebook has paid $5 million to more than 900 researchers for reporting security bugs, identifying vulnerabilities in its services or infrastructure that can create security or privacy risks.