Online safety has always been a concern whether in Lebanon or anywhere in the world. No matter how much the social media digital platforms have been evolving, the risk of security breaches is not minimal and one can always come across irregularities. This is what happened with three students from the Lebanese University.
Majd Dhainy, Hassan Badran, and Hadi Zein al-Din, three 21-year old Computer Science students had their names added to the Facebook Honor List after discovering a data failure in the chat group on Instagram. For those who don’t know, Facebook owns Instagram.
After contacting the company, Dhainy received a surprising direct reply. Facebook not only added their names to the honor list but also offered a monetary reward and thanked them for stopping a much bigger issue.
According to the person replying back to them, the failure could have led non-admin Instagram chat users to reject new members from joining the group, which would have caused a major problem. Unfortunately, this is not the first security gap. Similar cases have been previously found on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Avira, Microsoft, and Linkedin.
These Lebanese students were able to recognize that crucial technological default when FB team missed it or couldn’t. This comes during a time where the virtual world dominates the real world and influences the minds. It is definitely a reason for all of us Lebanese citizens to be very proud, especially considering that these students are from the Lebanese University, which is a public institution.
When such things happen, our hopes on the youth of Lebanon and on its public institutions seem to rise to stratospheric levels. It is as if we realize the incredible human potential our country has that sometimes go to waste due to our lack of belief in ourselves and in those around us, or in our public and educational institutions.
As mentioned previously, this kind of failure has taken place before on several social media digital platforms. Thus, all users are urged to report any suspicion related to the proper functioning of such platforms before it grows to larger proportions.
