Facebook's bug bounty program has given more than $1M to researchers in 51 countries

Facebook has tapped into the power of crowdsourcing to make the site a safer place and reward researchers willing to help it out to that end.

The social network shelled out more than $1 million over the past couple years to 329 people in 51 countries who reported security problems with the site. The youngest was 13 years old. A couple of those researchers went on to work for the tech giant’s security branch.

The Bug Bounty program was launched in 2011 to reward people who report issues to the site and make it a safer place to hang out online, Facebook Security Engineer Collin Greene says in a note posted to the site’s security blog:

So far the program has been even more successful than we’d anticipated.