Andre Yoskowitz
26 Oct 2010 0:34
Mozilla has paid 12-year old Alex Miller $3000 this week, thanking him for finding a critical buffer overflow and memory corruption flaw in the popular Firefox browser.
The company pays out prizes to security researchers (or kids) who disclose vulnerabilities.
Miller says he became motivated to find a security hole in the browser after Mozilla bumped up its prize from $500 to $3000 earlier this year.
The 12-year old says he spent 90 minutes a day, for 10 days straight, until he found the critical flaw.
His 15-hour crusade netted him $3000.
TechSpot says the "flaw can be exploited to crash a victim's browser and potentially run arbitrary code on their computer."
Mozilla patched the exploit with the release of Firefox 3.6.11.