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Facebook vulnerability 2013

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Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013

#21
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what the hell were they doing responding "This is not a bug." without investigating or asking for more details? What the hell is the point of even responding to possible security alerts from the general public if you're not going to investigate?

I am curious to how many trash reports they have to sort through to identify real bug reports. Anyone care to comment?

[deleted]

Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013

#22
Of course in hindsight they should have been more diligent, but how many reports do they receive per day? But I see no excuse for not paying the guy for finding a serious flaw in their system, especially dismissing it on 'TOS' grounds.

Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013

#23
I don't think you guys understand. You can't publicly use the exploit and then back away and use the white hat system after the fact. It clearly shows him spamming some profile before even making the first contact.

Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013

#24

Wow, upvoting this and I really hope it goes viral and FB gets called out for it. Hopefully he can get the bug bounty he deserves. That's incredibly sleazy of FB to treat him this way.

I'm surprised at how many people just assume the FB sec team doesn't want to pay and therefore tries to not pay if they can get away with it. Their history of paying out is completely the opposite. I've reported several bugs and they're always extremely helpful. They're not an insurance company that wants to reduce cost by screwing over users and there is no historical evidence of that. They want to pay for bugs and get as many of them as possible. What they don't want is for researchers to mess with other users' data. The guy could have just used two accounts to demo (he managed to create a new account after his own account was blocked). Using Zucks account doesn't make it more convincing from a tech perspective. It only makes the guy taken less serious as most researchers care more about how it works than messing with accounts of famous people. Not the smartest move. I understand the sec team draws a line and doesn't pay researchers that mess with other people's data. That's not sleazy, that's sane otherwise it gets exponentially worse as people try to outdo each other in terms of impact instead of focusing on explaining the technique behind a hack.

Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013

#25

After watching the video, it looks like the exploit involves: 1) Getting the target user's userId. This used to be part of a user's profile URL but Facebook allowed people to choose a "vanity URL" quite a while ago, so they're no longer as visible. So, instead, the userId is obtained from a FB Graph API query. 2) The form that makes up the "post to newsfeed" has a bunch of hidden inputs. One of them refers to a "xhpc…

This used to be part of a user's profile URL but Facebook allowed people to choose a "vanity URL" quite a while ago, so they're no longer as visible.

They're still visible in photo albums and the like. Far from hidden.

Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013

#27
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what the hell were they doing responding "This is not a bug." without investigating or asking for more details? What the hell is the point of even responding to possible security alerts from the general public if you're not going to investigate?

I am curious to how many trash reports they have to sort through to identify real bug reports. Anyone care to comment?

[deleted]
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