Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pay the man. He stumbled around a bit trying to work out how to help, but he brought a flaw to your attention in what he thought was a polite way. If unleashed, this bug could've been used to wreak havoc on Facebook and damage the company's reputation. $500 is the very least FB should be paying.
Is it even lawful for them to pay people that knowingly invade other people's accounts?
Facebook vulnerability 2013
91–100 of 301 posts
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#92Earlier 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?
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
#93Hey 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.
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#94Hey 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…
the language barriers are enough to justify any mistakes made in conforming precisely with the t&cs. he didn't abuse the hack. he reported it to you. pay him tbh.
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#95Wow, 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…
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#96Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#97When the top guys behave like this about rules, it clearly shows a lack of conscience. Rules are made to keep 99.9% of mess at bay.
This guy invaded the privacy of say 1-2 people that too to when the relevant authorities didn't respond in the correct manner, and saved the invasion of privacy of millions at least.
And what privacy? only a relevant post (not a spam) on profile of the company's biggest authority.
Yeah someone probably died of laughter from that post/ breach of privacy... So DUMB!
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're acting as if there's no precedent implicated in Facebook learning of someone violating both their normal ToS and the terms of their bug bounty program by compromising someone else's account, and then paying them a reward.
You're wrong about that.
Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#99Re: Facebook vulnerability 2013
#100Earlier 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…
> They just can't pay him for having demonstrated a vulnerability by hacking someone's account.
I don't see why that is. They already provide the following caveat:
> When you are unable to reproduce a bug with a test account, it is acceptable to use a real account, except for automated testing.[1]
So I don't think there's some kind of legal issue there, if that's what you mean. And you could provide other caveats, like, "you can use a real account if no one is listening to you" (I grant that this may not have helped here either).
I'll reiterate what I said above, which is that the policy is fine, as long as everyone recognizes that it has a strong potential to reduce the security of Facebook. And that ought to raise some sort of alarm, right?