Quote:Facebook announced on Thursday that it has paid out more than $1.1 million through its bug bounty program in 2018, which brings the total paid by the social media giant since the launch of its program in 2011 to roughly $7.5 million.

The $1.1 million has been awarded to researchers from over 100 countries for more than 700 valid reports – the average reward amount was roughly $1,500. Facebook says it has received approximately 17,800 reports in total.

The expanded bug bounty program includes rewards for data abuse and compromised third-party apps. One noteworthy report was related to a third-party SDK that was collecting the access tokens of users who utilized the Facebook Login feature in apps using the problematic SDK.

“By extending our program to third-party apps, we hope to encourage more companies to see value in teaming up with whitehat researchers to secure their services and the entire technology ecosystem as we all work to counter similar threats. As security work is never finished, we believe that transparency and collaboration are key to staying ahead of adversaries and building trust with security researchers,” said Dan Gurfinkel, Security Engineering Manager at Facebook.