Did someone post this to Reddit yet? This guy should get the bounty.
Facebook vulnerability 2013
81–90 of 301 posts
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're willfully ignoring what the situation actually is.
The situation is the guy in good faith tried to give them repro steps and report a critical bug. Technically he fucked up and didn't do it on a white hat account. No harm was intended or done. They are denying him his reward based on a technicality. If that FB employee is not some lawyer trying to cover their asses, then he should want to pay this person and make it happen via some exception. If they truly didn't car…
They're not "denying him the reward". He demonstrated the vulnerability on someone's actual account. They can't pay people to fuck with other people's accounts. That's not what bug bounties are about. Only on a message board is this hard to understand.
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#83Hey folks - I work on security at Facebook (though not specifically the Whitehat program) and just wanted to let you know we're looking into this right now.
OK - so I work on a security team at Facebook and sometimes help with reviewing Whitehat reports. 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 polic…
How didn't he make a good faith effort? It seems that a language barrier may be part of the issue, no?
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
"As you can see at https://www.facebook.com/whitehat , in order to qualify for a payout you must "make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations" and "use a test account instead of a real account when investigating bugs." I just looked at it, then switched Facebook to Arabic and the TOS is magically still in English (edit - and right aligned really badly as the page evidently expects arabic). If you demand that…
They can't pay people to violate their terms of use or to try to violate the privacy of their users. Even if they wanted to, they're probably not allowed to do that.
They wouldn't paying him to violate the terms ... and it's not like Facebook has any problem with changing a user's privacy settings without permission - except I guess we probably somewhere in the agreements agreed to allow that, or not hold them accountable - probably both..
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#85Looks like if you edit facebook in firebug while you are posting a link to your newsfeed you can change the source userid which is not validated/checked and gets posted even though you dont have the permission to do it
This isn't true.
Obviously you cannot do so any longer as the bug has been fixed, but that seems like a good description of the exploit as shown in the video.
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it concern you that ultimately the way the OP got your attention is by posting to MZ's account? Are you sure you'd have ever "discovered" it if he hadn't? I agree that the OP didn't do a great job, but if he's submitting a vulnerability that you really want to hear about and you're ignoring him because of some miscommunication and you ding him for doing the one thing that gets your attention, you're creating an…
I think there's a spectrum between letting whitehats do anything (including violating privacy, hurting real user accounts, etc) vs. suing everyone who changes a GET param somewhere. Having a whitehat program with (IMO reasonable) guidelines around not impacting unsuspecting real users seems to me like a good balance and is fairly close to the first part of the spectrum. Obviously I don't love the end outcome, and thi…
So no one reasonable is allowed to actually make a decision eh? Must be shitty working at Facebook if decisions don't have a human-compassionate influence to them.
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
>this would have gone better for all parties if he had used a test account and included some kind of repro instructions Clearly, but that's not really something you can control. From your perspective, the other side of the tradeoff with "hurting real user accounts" is "leaving open a huge security hole", not "being mean to whitehats when they screw up". I don't disagree that the guidelines seem quite reasonable prima…
Again: how exactly do you propose that they write a policy that compensates people for violating the security of their users? Not the security of Facebook, but the integrity of their actual users. We all know this person had good intentions. But good intentions aren't always enough. Facebook doesn't appear to be freaking out at him. They just can't pay him for having demonstrated a vulnerability by hacking someone's…
Firstly, no idea how you can conclude he hacked an account. A bit strong of language there? Second, does reason not come into play here? You don't have to write a policy to compensate people for violating privacy - however if you have a human making decisions, and not just a drone following written orders, then the ability to make compromises exist. Just no one at Facebook wants to engage and be human it seems.
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The situation is the guy in good faith tried to give them repro steps and report a critical bug. Technically he fucked up and didn't do it on a white hat account. No harm was intended or done. They are denying him his reward based on a technicality. If that FB employee is not some lawyer trying to cover their asses, then he should want to pay this person and make it happen via some exception. If they truly didn't car…
They're not "denying him the reward". He demonstrated the vulnerability on someone's actual account. They can't pay people to fuck with other people's accounts. That's not what bug bounties are about. Only on a message board is this hard to understand.
"Paying people to fuck with people's accounts" is a pretty dishonest way to frame this.
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#89Note to security response teams everywhere: Not all vulnerability reporters speak perfect English, nor are they all experienced in writing up details on how to exploit issues. It is your responsibility to obtain details from reporters, after the initial report, to avoid situations like this. Facebook should give a bug bounty here, due to their lack of due diligence in following up with the initial responses.
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?
Yeah, I wonder why the guy who said "This is not a bug." isn't actually the one getting in trouble. Clearly I understand why not - but then his actions lead to the person reporting to escalate their actions to get attention. If the "This is not a bug." guy actually helped guide the person reporting to the proper, expected actions, then this would have likely gone completely differently.
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#90Hey folks - I work on security at Facebook (though not specifically the Whitehat program) and just wanted to let you know we're looking into this right now.
OK - so I work on a security team at Facebook and sometimes help with reviewing Whitehat reports. 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 polic…
So the security person who said "This is not a bug," - what's happening there? If they had guided the guy reporting the bug, asked for more information or directed him to the expected methods for reporting, then this would have likely gone completely differently, right?