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Comment by arcticfox | Hacker News Reader

I agree. This was basically unrestricted access to any Facebook account. What a MASSIVE flaw.

And who knows if this was already exploited in the wild?

$15k is nothing at all compared to the scale of this issue...

It's not really unrestricted. Given that this is forcing the password reset, you can't silently do it, right? So anyone exploiting it knows there's a limited number of uses before people notice that their passwords are being reset by not them.

True, the restriction is that you only get a guarantee of getting in one time. I meant that there are no restrictions on what you can do once you're in. (E.g. a XSS chat hack or something like that would be restricted in that sense)

Doesn't Facebook alert the user if it detects suspicious account login activity from an unknown location or IP?

The SMS and the e-mail about the password change is already a big alert for the user.

$15k and a likely open FB job offer

> job offer

Really? For brute forcing an un-rate-limited endpoint? I doubt it.

I'm sure they might encourage him to interview, but he's not going to get a serious job offer just from this. There's essentially nothing technical or skillful going on here, other than the basic coding ability to do HTTP requests in a loop and the hunch to investigate if subdomains don't rate limit.

He was resourceful enough to find a security flaw of the highest severity in the only product of a $300 billion dollar company. A hole that was somehow missed by said company's own security auditors, who collectively are probably paid many millions of dollars per year entirely to look for such holes. So that's something.

But you're right, he might have just got lucky. The one fish in a school of 100,000 who finds the hole in the net probably isn't smarter than all the other fish. But that just strengthens the argument that companies should reward very generously for these exploits, because increasing the number of white-hats looking for them is a good way to ensure that they get found by one.

He's found quite a few different bugs:

https://hackerone.com/anand786 https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/thanks (listed 2015, 2014, 2013)

Over 20k in bounties in the last year listed, this 15k bounty, and multiple unlisted amounts from Yahoo. I don't think he cares about a job offer from FB too much.

Clearly this is the kind of role Facebook needs to fill ASAP.

Using a tool 'Burb' spendin time searching "what might be vulnerable" can be worth atmost 15 grands, not a $100.000+ job.

for a bruteforce ?

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