India accounted for the largest share of Facebook’s bug bounty programme in the first half of 2016, ahead of countries such as the US and Mexico.

The social networking giant paid a total of $611,741 to 149 researchers between January-June this year as part of the bug bounty programme.

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

“We received more than 9,000 reports in the first half of 2016... The top three countries based on the number of payouts were India, the US and Mexico,” Facebook said in a blogpost.

In March this year, Facebook had said it had paid ₹4.84 crore to researchers in India as part of the bug bounty programme, the most paid till then by the US-based firm.

India is home to Facebook’s second largest userbase with 155 million monthly active users and 77 million daily active users.

Since its launch in 2011, the US-based firm has rewarded researchers for reporting security bugs, identifying vulnerabilities in Facebook’s services or infrastructure that can create security or privacy risks.

The programme, which has completed five years, has seen more than $5 million being paid in payouts to over 900 researchers across the world.

“... researchers also gave us ideas about how to make our programme even better, so we are making changes to better support our bug bounty community... This year, we added WhatsApp to our programme, expanded payment options to include Bitcoin, and switched to an automated payment process so we can pay researchers faster,” Joey Tyson, a security engineer in the Facebook Bug Bounty team, wrote.

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