Supercharge your infrastructure

A Palestinian IT graduate 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.

As explained in this 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.

Shreateh claims he tried to report the problem to Facebook's security account twice. The problem, however, was that since Facebook's team wasn't friends with the target account he used to demonstrate the bug, they could not see the links he provided.

To try and escalate the issue, Shreateh then took what might be regarded as the “nuclear option” and posted an image into Mark Zuckerburg's timeline, providing the link to Facebook as proof of the bug. He was then contacted by Facebook security engineer Ola Okelola requesting details of the vulnerability, which he provided.

This is where things went sour: because demonstrating the vulnerability constitutes a violation of Facebook's terms of service, Shreateh had his account suspended. The same ToS violation was given as the reason that Shreateh won't be paid under Facebook's bug bounty.

Shreateh's replay of the bug is in the video below. ®

Watch Video

5 ways to prepare your advertising infrastructure for disaster