Pakistan's child prodigy praised for ethical hacking
11-year-old M Shahzad has been commended by Microsoft, Yahoo, Mediafire, Bitcasa among others.
LAHORE (Web Desk) – A 6th grade aspiring tech prodigy Muhammad Shahzad uses cross site scripting to identify vulnerabilities on various platforms and instead of exploiting the loophole, responsibly reports it along with advice to secure the platform to those managing the websites, Dunya News has learnt.
Eleven-year-old Shahzad has successfully found and reported bugs on Yahoo, Mediafire, Bitcasa and Samsung and Microsoft, earning rewards and appreciation from tech giants in return.
The young talent has been awarded with numerous recognitions; including a T-shirt from Yahoo, a certificate from Mediafire and a premium membership-account on 4Shared. He has also got his name listed in Bitcasa’s ‘hall of fame’.
The prodigy says he derives huge motivation and inspiration from the work and achievements of Arfa Karim – Pakistan’s deceased IT genius who made headlines by being the youngest person in the world to complete a Microsoft certification – and aims to make a mark in futuristic web development technologies.
In an interview, he said: “I started going to Arfa Karim Foundation as I’m learning many things from the IT experts.”
“I already knew basics of Python, PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript without any help from others,” he said while mentioning aspirations to learn these technologies.
Shahzad is also interested in blogging which he says he is pursuing as a hobby.
“Blogging is as my hobby and I'm working hard to let admins of big tech companies know about different kind of security flaws and how to patch them as It's important for admins to secure their server for their customers or clients,” he added.
