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I am really disappointed at Facebook for their stance in this situation. The blog post written by Alex reaches far too into the personal attack territory.

> We were surprised because he did not mention these actions in his previous correspondence with us.

Painting a picture/creating a narrative, poor us, we're surprised.

> it was reasonable to believe that Wes was operating on behalf of Synack

Filling in affiliations, or using a company address during parts of communication could very well have been out of detailing legitimacy as well as convenience. You can not, and should not infer a researcher operates on behalf of their company when reporting a bug, and as a CSO and someone who acts as a security researcher you KNOW that we always distance ourselves from our workplace when reporting or talking about security.

> Wes to set a precedent that anybody can exfiltrate unnecessary amounts of data

Logging in, grabbing keys but not touching user data is most certainly not breaking your ToS. Yet you paint it as unethical here. Where do you draw the line? Internal network names? Internal IP's, passwd files?

> one of my engineers involved in this issue once found a great (and in his case, original) RCE

Really, "and in his case, original"? Come on, act professional you're presenting one of the largest companies in the world.

> we have no evidence that Wes or anybody else accessed any user data

DING! DING! DING! Yet using terms like "intentional exfiltration of data" to draw grey areas that convenience you.

They've definitely screwed the pooch on this one.

He phoned the researcher's CEO and subtly threatened legal action. This is spin at it's finest.

Or, he got in touch with the company he thought the researcher was affiliated with, to discuss what he felt was a very serious issue without involving lawyers. The classic outrage case is when a big company starts sending scary letters signed by lawyers, first thing. Maybe we should be less outraged when someone goes out of his way to be reasonable.

He brought up both lawyers and law enforcement in that phone call. Come on, dude.

He didn't. Also, he made a phone call and made every effort to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who, perhaps not maliciously and through naiveté, did something very silly and then made it even sillier by making it look hard to distinguish from extortion.

The best possible outcome there would have been a grumpy letter from lawyers asking him to sign an affidavit he's destroyed all the data he picked up. The worst would have been people in suits packing away his every computing device at 4 am. None of this happened and it seems the main reason it didn't is 'Alex Stamos is not a dick and Facebook lets him not be a dick'. That's a good outcome, by any measure.

> that in itself breaks their ToS for the bug bounty program

Except it doesn't?

Once RCE is confirmed, any further access from there would break ToS. It's bullshit, and kind of a cop-out - but it's a trade-off that these companies have to make. Otherwise we could employ techniques like social engineering to gain internal access, then start pen-testing from within the network.

Their ToS does not state this. They do however specifically state that social engineering attacks are not eligible.

You're actually correct. I think this situation is a bit more complicated than it seems at first.

Updated original reply.

I'd say it does.

Not interact with other accounts without the consent of their owners.

Edit: whoops I mis-read this a bit, but the point still stands - he escalated using AWS keypair that did not belong to him, and he had no consent of the owner.

Obviously that's referring to facebook accounts.

Edit: I feel that your edit is still stretching the terms a bit. It seems pretty clear that this isn't the abuse that the clause intends to prevent.

Also, the guy seems to only have verified that the credentials worked.

He might've just got hashes from those private keys, for proof. It's not clear if he actually took all these keys. To me this would seem like a responsible, easy and realistic way of proving you could've taken the keys if you were malicious.

The whole point is kinda moot, seeing how they did not have proper auditing and can't know if the keys were taken either way.