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Security Researcher Makes His Point By Hacking Into Zuckerberg's Facebook Page

Posted by samzenpus on from the do-you-see-it-now? dept.

Eugriped3z writes "Whitehat Palestinian hacker Kahlil Shreateh submitted a bug report to Facebook's Whitehat bug reporting page not once, but twice. After it was ignored the first time and denied outright on the second occasion (which included links to an example as proof), he hacked Mark Zuckerberg's personal timeline, leaving both an explanation and an apology. From the article: 'In less than a minute, Shreateh's Facebook account was suspended and he was contacted by a Facebook security engineer requesting all the details of the exploit. 'Unfortunately your report to our Whitehat system did not have enough technical information for us to take action on it,' the engineer wrote in an email. 'We cannot respond to reports which do not contain enough detail to allow us to reproduce an issue.' Facebook has a policy that it will pay a minimum $500 bounty for any security flaws that a hacker finds. However, the company has refused to pay Shreateh for discovering the vulnerability because his actions violated Facebook's Terms of Service.'"

12 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Take it public by scubamage · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Screw them, the onus is on them to take action when someone reports a bug. If you don't have enough information when there is a security problem, maybe, JUST MAYBE, you should follow up with the submitter. If I was the submitter I'd just publish the exploit and be done with it.

    1. Re:Take it public by SQLGuru · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I read the guy's own post about it. He reported what he could do and not the steps required to exploit it. The Facebook team couldn't reproduce it as a bug (since there were no repro steps) and closed it as "not a bug".

      So really, the problem was one of communication. The guy has the problem a lot of my clients/users have in that they don't give enough detail to investigate the bug and Facebook didn't really follow what he was trying to say (since he just sent them links saying "look what I did"). I'm not saying he didn't legitimately find an exploit and probably deserves some bounty ($500 is nothing to a company like Facebook), but Facebook should probably have some guidelines for how to submit bugs.

      Aside - what any bug report needs:
      * What action were you taking?
      * What result did you observe?
      * What result did you expect?
      * Are there specific data values that always exhibit the symptom?
      * Are there specific data values that do not exhibit the symptom?
      * Reproduction steps (be as detailed as possible)
      * Any other useful details about the bug (error messages, screen shots, etc.)

    2. Re:Take it public by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm a QA analyst, and the quote: "We cannot respond to reports which do not contain enough detail to allow us to reproduce an issue." is totally incorrect. An issue does not have to be reproducable in order to warrant some debugging and investigation.

    3. Re:Take it public by Skapare · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If YOU could read the guy's post, then that would be the WRONG place for him to put the details about how to reproduce it. Facebook engineers should have contacted HIM, directly, by a secure means, to get those details. If Facebook engineers expect exploits to be posted in a public forum, then it is THEY who are doing this wrong.

      --
      now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
    4. Re:Take it public by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The severity of a problem determines whether it pays to investigate. An odd crash once a week with no repeatable underlying condition and no data loss doesn't warrant a through investigation.

      A severe security hole DOES! Almost invariably. Anything that allows an attacker to gain access in some way IS a reason for an investigation. The crucial point here is that undoing the damage is nearly impossible. With a crash, you can reenter the data and undo the damage. With a security breach, the data is out and there is NO way you can undo the damage, once data is out, it IS out.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    5. Re:Take it public by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm a programmer too. You ALWAYS respond to issues, even if it's just, "Can't Reproduce: Not enough info in bug report."

    6. Re:Take it public by GNious · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is why you change the Bug Status from "New" to "Need More Information", and NOT to "Closed" or "Get Lost, Ass".

  2. Re:Won't pay? by Nerdfest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps they should pay him extra and thank him ... he could have done much, much, worse, and from a dummy account. He quite obviously wanted to help. Being a dick to people trying to help you is not a great way to encourage others.

  3. Re:Won't pay? by afidel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ding! Next time maybe he sells it on the black market instead of trying repeatedly to inform a company that obviously doesn't give a crap about security.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  4. Re:That's a catch 22 by Nerdfest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sell it on the open market, plenty of money.

  5. Re:Won't pay? by IronOxen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, he also exposed a bug in the bug reporting system that prevents it from responding to and or acknowledging the exact type of vulnerabilities it was designed to find. It was obviously repeatable since the vulnerability was reported twice and was ignored both times. He should be paid for that one as well.

  6. A great way to alienate the white-hat community. by fuzzytv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good work, Facebook! Kinda resembles what happened at GitHub ~18 months ago: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/how-github-handled-getting-hacked/10473

    If someone from Facebook reads this, and it's TL;DR; here are the next steps:

    #1 apologize to the guy, acknowledge he reported the issue twice
    #2 reinstate the account and pay him his reward
    #3 fix the damn issue