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Google has rewarded an Uruguayan school student $10,000 after he exposed a security flaw which hackers could have used to access sensitive data.
Ezequiel Pereira wrote in a blog post that one day he was bored and so he tried to find a bug on Google.
After several failed attempts, he found one internal web page that did not require a username or any other information to access, The Telegraph reported on Monday.
"It had many links to different sections about Google services and infrastructure, but before I visited any section, I read something in the footer: 'Google Confidential'," the student wrote in a blog post in July.
"At that point, I stopped poking at the website and reported the issue right away," he added.
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Google's security team replied saying they were looking into the issue.
"I thought to myself 'Cool, this is probably a small thing that isn't worth a dime, the website probably had some technical stuff about Google servers and nothing really important'," he recalled.
"I don't know what the website did contain, but some weeks later I got an e-mail right after getting out of school that said my report was worth much more than a dime."
Google later paid him $10,000 and fixed the bug.
Google runs a Vulnerability Reward Programme (VRP), offering monetary rewards to reporters who flag bugs.
Earlier this year, Google increased the bounty for finding a bug in its proprietary Android OS to as much as $2,00,000.
