Facebook rewarding hackers

Jamie Hinks
August 31, 2011
1 Comment

facebook hackathonAnyone that has an account on Facebook and real life friends knows the drill by now when it comes to the site. The Facebook bible should read as follows:

Thou shalt not save my password onto the browser memory of PC, Mac, Laptop, portable device or internet-enabled TV.

If you flout the Facebook bible commandment above for a mere day then all hell will break loose. Not only will you be signed up to the pages of every sports team you despise. You can also expect to have a crude picture as the one that greets anyone visiting your profile as well as an updated status explaining everyone the virtues of eating your own excrement and washing it down with another waste product. Facebook has decided to let most of it fly in the past. Now the site is getting more stringent when it comes to the real hackers though.

The site has come up with a novel way of sorting out any problems they may have with hackers – pay them. The Bug Bounty Program rewards those that find bugs in the system. In the three weeks since it came into being, the program has handed out £25,000 including one user earning as much as £4,300 for himself.

Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer, said, “The program has also been great because it has made our site more secure – by surfacing issues large and small, introducing us to novel attack vectors, and helping us improve lots of corners in our code.

“We received really positive feedback when we launched our responsible disclosure policy last year, in which we told researchers we would not take adverse actions against them when they followed the policy in reporting bugs.

“We are one of the first companies to clearly lay out our policy in order to make those who discover vulnerabilities more comfortable in reporting, and we are happy to see that other organizations are adopting a similar stance.”

It comes in the wake of Anonymous sending out a message on YouTube that it would be shutting down Facebook by November 5th. Man. Anonymous’ friends must have posted something pretty wack on his profile! Although it should be pointed out that people like Anonymous will still incur Marky Z’s wrath should they attack the site. That’s of course is if Zuckerberg’s profile hasn’t been hacked again. Unless you really did mean to put up that picture of you passed out naked in a toilet punch drunk as your profile pic, Mark.

This might be the only time in your life that you can legitimately spend time on Facebook in an attempt to make money.

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