A Hacker Discovered A Way To Delete Every One Of Your Facebook Photo Albums Using Four Lines Of Code
Feb 13, 2015
Tiffany Mueller
Tiffany Mueller is a photographer and content strategist based in Hawi, Hawaii. Her work has been shared by top publications like The New York Times, Adobe, and others.
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There are millions of photos are posted to Facebook every hour and a large part of the people posting the images don’t even think twice about just how secure the social media giant is going to keep to their images once they are uploaded. That’s exactly why the bug discovered by white hat hacker, Laxman Muthiyah, should serve as a reminder to us all not to take internet security for granted, even when dealing with huge corporations such as Facebook.
Muthivah, released his findings on his blog, and posted a video to YouTube (below) showing exactly how he was able to permanently delete any photo album on Facebook, including my photo albums, your photo albums, even Mark Zuckerberg’s photo albums. And he was able to do this startlingly easy using just four lines of code.
Fortunately for Facebook, Muthiyah decided not to take advantage of his findings by deleting everyone’s photos. Rather, he reported the bug to Facebook’s security team immediately. He says the team was quick to respond and a fix to the bug was in place in less than two hours. The $190 billion company has apparently put a dollar value on it’s 1.35 million+ user’s photo albums by offering Muthiyah a reward amounting to the princely sum (*cough cough*) of $12,500.
[ Laxman Muthiyah via Gizmodo ]
Tiffany Mueller
Tiffany Mueller is a photographer and content strategist based in Hawi, Hawaii. Her work has been shared by top publications like The New York Times, Adobe, and others.
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11 responses to “A Hacker Discovered A Way To Delete Every One Of Your Facebook Photo Albums Using Four Lines Of Code”
$12,500 for 4 lines of code isn’t bad!
There worth billions!!! They could of added another hundred thousand,
you sentence hurts my brain….
*They’re
*could HAVE
And this is why the only copy of all your photos shouldn’t be on Facebook!
How can i reach him?
The link to his blog is in the article. A super-detective might think to look there for contact information.
It was rather sarcastic comment because its real pain for user to delete his own photos in facebook, so small script would be handy.
Spell check before you post – It is Mark Zuckerberg and not Mark Zuckerbuer’!
I would have deleted the Facebook photo albums in lieu of the money…
Except that none of the lines shown are “lines of code”. And even if they were, lines of code is a useless measure for how hard something was to do. (and regarding the “small” sum, $12,500 is a pretty nice bounty in comparison)
(Not that your article is any worse than other mainstream reporting about security issues… But I’d very much prefer if DIYphotography were about DIY photography and not “random things involving photography from all over the net you can find everywhere”)
Amen. Let’s get back to MacGyvering photo gear from common household items!