Mark Zuckerberg's personal Facebook page was hacked by a man who wanted to illustrate a security bug. The Palestinian computer programmer, who discovered a glitch in Facebook's security system last week, broke into Zuckerberg's account and posted a message on the billionaire's timeline.
But the hacker's move soon backfired.
Khalil Shreateh reportedly contacted Facebook twice in the last week to report a flaw that allowed him to post on any user's timeline regardless of privacy settings. To prove the defect, he hacked into the account of Sarah Goodin, one of
Zuckerberg's Harvard former classmates, and sent screenshots to the social network, Fox News reported.
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Shreateh was attempting to report the problem under Facebook's "whitehat" program, which pays hackers to report bugs rather than using or selling them.
But after being told by a Facebook representative that what Shreateh discovered was "not a bug," he decided raise the alarm once again, this time in grand fashion.
Shreahteh breached Zuckerberg's personal account and posted a message on the CEO's timeline for all his friends to see.
"Dear Mark Zuckerberg, First sorry for breaking your privacy and post [sic] to your wall, I has [sic] no other choice to make after all the reports I sent to Facebook team."
But the hacker's plan backfired when a Facebook rep immediately contacted Shreateh, shut down his account temporarily, and denied him payment under the "whitehat" program for violating its terms.
"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,"
Facebook security team member Matt Jones wrote on Hacker News. "[We] will pay out for future reports from him if they're found and demonstrated within these guidelines."
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