Mediaboss Marketing

New Delhi: India, which accounts for over 93 million Facebook users, reported the largest number of bugs under the social networking giant's bug bounty programme last year.

The California-headquartered firm said it received a total of 14,763 submissions in 2013, of which 687 bugs were found to be valid and eligible to receive rewards.

A bug is an error or defect in a software or hardware that causes a programme to malfunction. It often occurs due to conflicts in software when applications try to run in tandem.

The social networking platform, which has over 1.2 billion users globally, paid $1.5 million last year to security researchers who report bugs on its website.

"India contributed the largest number of valid bugs at 136, with an average reward of $1,353. The US reported 92 issues and averaged $2,272 in rewards," Facebook said in a post.

Brazil and the UK were third and fourth by volume, with 53 bugs and 40 bugs and average rewards of $3,792 and $2,950, respectively, it added.

Researchers in Russia earned the highest amount per report in 2013, receiving an average of $3,961 for 38 bugs, Facebook said.

It said: "We've paid over $2 million since we got started in 2011, and in 2013 we paid out $1.5 million to 330 researchers across the globe."

The average reward in 2013 was $2,204, and most bugs were discovered in non-core properties, such as websites operated by companies the firm had acquired, it added.

"2014 is looking good so far. The volume of high-severity issues is down, and we're hearing from researchers that it's tougher to find good bugs," Facebook said.

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India leads the race in reporting bugs on Facebook in 2013