BANGALORE: Facebook declared that it paid out $1.5 million to 330 security researchers worldwide in 2013, as part of its bug bounty program, as reported by ZDnet.

Over all, Facebook received 14,763 bug submissions last year, an increase of 246 percent from 2012. Out of those only 687 were deemed eligible and valid to accept financial compensation. The average compensation was $2,204, and most of the bugs were derived from ‘non-core properties’, such as websites operated by some of Facebook’s acquisitions.

Besides, only six percent of those valid bugs were labeled as highly severe. Facebook informed its median fix time for high-severity issues were just six hours, from reading the first submission to implementing an initial fix. The company is also aimed at concentrating on efficiency when the program grows.

Researchers in Russia are in zenith with an average of $3,961 in rewards for 38 bugs reported. Whereas India offered 136 valid bugs, with an average of $3,961; United States issued 92 bugs with an average of $2,272; Brazil offered 53 bugs with an average of $3,792 and U.K. issued 40 bugs with an average of $2,950.

The social networking giant says the amount of high-severity issues is down, and researchers are informing the company that it is ‘harder to get good bugs’. In order to make sure that the researchers are not losing their interest, Facebook will continue enhancing its compensation amounts for high severity issues.

Facebook is changing its reward rules for the coming year, by enhancing some payouts and including Parse, Atlas, Instagram, and Onavo to the program. Facebook is also taking out text-injection faults from the payout list, by arguing that submitting additional text on a page is not a security issue.

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