Well what do you know! Can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg being hacked! Not in this lifetime right! Well it actually did happen. The man behind it? Security researcher Khalil Shreateh from Palestine.
Khalil Shreateh found a bug that allowed him post stuff to other people’s Walls and we all know this is not possible unless is posted by yourself or your friends on Facebook. Khalil knowing Facebook has a bounty program where it pays people to report bugs instead of using them or selling them on the black market; tried not once but twice to contact Facebook about it.
First time he reached Mark Zuckerberg’s friend Sarah Goodin posting something on her wall, he then contacted Facebook’s security team with the proof that his bug was real but Facebook said:
“this was not a bug,”
A frustrated Khalil Shreateh certain he had found a bug that is a spammer’s dream, had no other choice then to take things a little further and contacted Zuckerberg himself not by sending him a private message or email but by posting on his wall! He had to make some sort of splash right! His posting to Mark’s read:
“Sorry for breaking your privacy … but a couple of days ago, I found a serious Facebook exploit”
And that finally worked! The Facebook security team finally understood the bug and fixed it quickly. They also temporarily suspended Shreateh’s account and said they wouldn’t pay him the bounty fee because, by posting to Zuck’s account, he violated Facebook’s terms of service. Then the Facebook team asked him to continue to help them find bugs, he says.
Do you think Facebook ripped off Shreateh or not? Facebook says that Shreateh didn’t include enough technical info when he tried to report it the bug. You can’t just demonstrate the bug, you have to explain how it works. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have hacked Zuck’s account if the security team had asked him for more details the first two times he tried to report it.
Is it that Mark Zuckerberg can’t afford the $500.00 promised in his hackers a bounty?! I mean the guy discovered a major security flaw and did everything right; he contacted more than once the Facebook team and only gets a palm in the back??
We found a link of Khalil Shreateh, a Palestinian developer and hacker who has a profile picture of Edward Snowden that you can find here.
