Alex is a bug hunter, but the bugs he's uncovering are unlikely to end up in any entomological reference book. Instead, the bug Alex found was a valid critical security flaw buried in the Firefox web browser. For his discovery, he was rewarded a bug bounty of $3,000 by Mozilla, the parent company of Firefox.
Alex knows the value of bug bounties; he knows what other companies are offering, so when Mozilla upped its bug bounty from $500, he was motivated.
...
He found something in an initial search and sent in a bug report, but it wasn't the right type of bug to qualify for the big bucks. Alex returned to the computer and his exploration. By Alex's estimation he spent about 90 minutes each day for about 10 days until he spotted it--a flaw in the memory of the running program.
Mozilla awards $3,000 to 12-year old bughunter
Posted on Monday, October 25 2010 @ 20:11 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck