Facebook has honored a Kerala based teenager by granting him $500 (Rs34,600 approx) for spotting and reporting a bug in its social messaging app WhatsApp. The 19-year-old KS Ananthakrishna, who is a B.Tech student at Pathanamthitta Mount Zion College of Engineering College, spotted a bug in WhatsApp that allowed users to completely remove files on the social messaging app without letting the other user know about the missing files.

According to a report in Kerala daily, Mathrubhumi, Ananthakrishna first spotted the bug two months following which he informed the Facebook officials about the issue and corrective measures. The company then verified Ananthakrishna's claims and after two months of observation awarded him with a cash prize worth $500.

Apart from offering the Kochi teen a cash prize, the social media giant also inducted him in its Hall of Fame. Ananthakrishna's name stands at the 80th spot on the company's Facebook Thanks list for 2019, wherein the social media giant honours people who share details of bugs and corrective measures that they spot on Facebook's platform. The list also honors people who spot bugs in the company's other platforms including WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, Ovano and the company's open source projects.

Apart from his work in the field of ethical hacking, Ananthakrishna, who is a native of Alappuzha, also work with the Kerala Police's research and development centre, Kerala Police Cyberdome.

Separately, WhatsApp, last month detected a bug on its platform that allowed malicious actors to install spyware on users' smartphones using a simple WhatsApp call. According to a report by the Financial Times, Israeli cyber intelligence company, NSO, had developed a code that could be transmitted on to users' smartphones even if they didn't answer the call.

This malicious code would leave all of a phone's data including the phone's call logs, contacts, emails, messages and photos, vulnerable to the hackers. What was worrisome about this spyware was that would delete the WhatsApp call log from the affected smartphone, giving users no means to determine a hack.

WhatsApp determined this vulnerability in early, soon after which the company rolled out an update to secure its servers and apps.