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

This is way better than mowing lawns.

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}