The Facebook’s bug hunter’s program attracted Web site users from around the world.

"The programme has been even more successful than we'd anticipated," Facebook said in a statement on its Web site. "We've paid out more than USD 1 million in bounties and have collaborated with researchers from all around the world to stamp out bugs in our products and in our infrastructure."

India turned out second in the bounty programme and has the fastest growing number of winners in the Facebook contest. Bugs cause programmes to malfunction by creating errors when more than one software is running. This creates a conflict between softwares when applications run simultaneously.

Bugs tend to create unexpected results or a software crash, and these errors can also provide unauthorized access to computer information. Bug fixing is something Indian programmers are good at, since typically they have a lot of experience in hacking and correcting computer-related problems. This is because engineering students cover a lot of math and science during their early education and they have the intellect to obtain defined objectives in a economically efficient manner.

Indian graduates from engineering schools are trained by outsourcing firms like Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consulting Services to work on computer programmes. The number of students enrolled in computer engineering and programming are also high in India. Software exporting firms like Infosys also cash in on their talents by employing them in overseas client locations.

In total, 329 users have received awards, said the social programming site. The youngest of the winners was a 13 year old. "The countries with the most bounty recipients are, in order, the US, India, UK, Turkey, and Germany. The countries with the fastest-growing number of recipients are, in order, the US, India, Turkey, Israel, Canada, Germany, Pakistan, Egypt, Brazil, Sweden, and Russia," reported India Times. Twenty percent of the bounty went to U.S. Facebook users, and the bug fixers came from 51 countries.

"Our Bug Bounty program allows us to harness the talent and perspective of people from all kinds of backgrounds, from all around the world,” said Facebook Security Engineer Collin Greene according to the Press Trust of India.

Incidentally, two of the bounty winners were given jobs at Facebook’s talented security operations.

In a related story, former NSA agent Edward Snowden was offered a security progmming job at Russia’s Facebook counterpart, V Kontakte, after he received asylum in Russia. The intelligence leaker is a fugitive from the U.S. and was charged with giving away secret information about U.S. intelligence gathering programmes.