Monday, August 19, 2013

Security Researcher “Khalil Shreateh” posts Facebook bug report on Zuckerberg’s wall

Summary: A Palestinian IT Security Researcher Khalil Shreateh discovered a Facebook bug that allowed a hacker to post on anyone’s wall — even if they weren’t that person’s friend. Khalil has had his account disabled and been told he won't be paid a bug bounty after demonstrating a Facebook security vulnerability by posting an image into Mark Zuckerburg's timeline.


On blog post, Khalil Shreateh discovered a vulnerability that allows an attacker to post images into someone else's timeline, even though they're not in the target's friend list. Khalil tried to report the problem to Facebook's security account twice via the company's bug-disclosure and bounty program. The first time, Facebook security representative "Emrakul" couldn't see the results of Khalil's work – presumably because Emrakul wasn't actually friends with the person who Shreateh used as a proof-of-concept for the loophole. The second time around, Emrakul told Shreateh that his findings were "not a bug." Khalil, who doesn't appear to keen on taking "no" for an answer, did the next logical step: Used his loophole to post directly on Zuck's wall, likely hoping to stir the pot a bit and get a stronger acknowledgement of his findings.

Facebook software engineer Matt Jones took to Hacker News to offer a bit of an explanation behind Facebook's response and why Shreateh is out his minimum reward of $500 for the finding.

“To be clear, we fixed this bug on Thursday. The OP is correct that we should have asked for additional repro instructions after his initial report. Unfortunately, all he submitted was a link to the post he'd already made (on a real account whose consent he did not have - violating our ToS and responsible disclosure policy), saying that "the bug allow facebook users to share links to other facebook users". Had he included the video initially, we would have caught this much more quickly,” Jones wrote.

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