12-Year-Old Hunts Firefox Flaw, Gets $3,000

When most of us were 12, we'd be doing small manual labor jobs for some spare cash. Maybe it was mowing the lawn or shovelling snow, but seventh-grader Alex Miller isn't your typical 12-year-old.

He's just taken a check from Mozilla for $3,000 after collecting one of the bug bounties. Miller found a security flaw in Firefox that Mozilla deemed valuable enough to reward with a $3,000 bounty – a sum that's up from the previous amount of $500. (Mozilla said that it has increased the bounty amount to reflect the change in the economy… but I'm still waiting for my salary to go up six-fold.)

Alex found the bug and sent in a report to Mozilla, but that wasn't enough to qualify for the money. He had to dig deeper. So, he spent 90 minutes a day for 10 days until he found the bug in the memory.

The 12-year-old said that he was "really, really, really, really, really happy," when the check came in.

His first use of his money? It was a donation of $100 to his neighbor's nonprofit organization of Unconditional Love Animal Rescue.

_{Source: Mercury News}