Google Rewards Teenager $36,000 For Finding Security Flaw

URUGUAYAN: Google has rewarded a teenager with $36,000 for help discovering a severe security flaw.

Ezequiel Pereira hailing from Uruguayan while surfing around the site found a serious security flaw that would have allowed him to make changes to internal company systems.

“I found something almost immediately that was worth $500 and it just felt so amazing. So I decided to just keep trying ever since then,” Pereira was quoted saying.

“It feels really good – I’m glad that I found something that was so important,” he added.

Though Pereira found the issue earlier this year, he only just got permission to write about how he discovered it this week after Google confirmed that it had fixed the issue, the report said.

It marks Pereira’s fifth accepted bug, but it’s by far his most lucrative.

Pereira was about a month shy of 17 when he first got paid for exposing a Google security flaw through its bug bounty programme.

Pereira got his first computer when he was 10, took an initial programming class when he was 11 and then spent years teaching himself different coding languages and techniques.

In 2016, Google flew him to its California headquarters after he won a coding contest.