Researcher Discovering Facebook Photo-Deleting Bug Rewarded $12,500 After 2-Hour Fix
Facebook has become a big part of people's lives and with over 1.3 billion users, it seems that the social network giant has created their very own ecosystem that we all trust to provide us with the promised connectivity of friends, entertainment and information. When things don't go right on Facebook, there could be serious consequences and repercussions – nearly 1.3 billion of them.
Facebook users tend to upload hundreds of millions of photos on a daily basis. With that, there is a certain level of trust and expected service that users count on day in and day out. Not to mention, Facebook users demand privacy. When there is a problem affecting photos stored on Facebook, time is of the essence as to not waste it in rectifying the issue at hand.
A case where there was a photo-deleting bug detected on the social networking giant prompted developers to go to work and find a solution. They wasted no time in conjuring up a fix as researchers were tapped to fix the bug first discovered by Laxman Muthiyah. When Muthiyah attempted to delete one of his photos using the Graph API on Facebook the issue was then discovered as something that should not be in place to delete photos.
Facebook is no stranger to vulnerabilities. This latest discovery only re-emphasizes how users should take precautions on such a cast network of users.
During Muthiyah's endeavor of using the Graph Explorer's (Facebook's advanced search explorer API system) access token for the job of deleting photos, a response received by the server was that the "application does not have the capability to make this API call." From there it was understood how another application has the ability to make this photo-delete call, thus sending off alarms as to a serious bug being found.
What Muthiyah had discovered was a way to remove any image in a Facebook photo album regardless of which the user account belonged to. We are talking about a serious pandemic on Facebook's hands if this photo-deleting bug know-how was to leak out. Facebook, as usual, had several protections in place to prevent certain types of abuse. Though, from the perspective of what this photo-deleting bug could do, it was in everyone's best interest to promptly find a solution now rather than later.
Just after a short two hours of finding and confirming the issue, Facebook made the necessary adjustments to rectify this photo-delete bug and, as a result, rewarded Muthiyah $12,500 for the discovery of the issue. Sometimes it pays to find and report an issue within something as massive as Facebook, literally.