Security researcher Dan Melamed came across the vulnerability in June 2016. The bug is some ways similar to a vulnerability discovered by another researcher around the same time. There’s just one major exception.
Dan Melamed said ,c Dan Melamed In addition, also had the ability to disable commenting on any video. This allows a bad actor the ability to delete videos on Facebook without permission or authentication.
The security researcher exploited the flaw by first creating a public event. On the Discussion part of the event, he uploaded a video and intercepted the POST request using Fiddler.
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This request, which looks something like https://www.facebook.com/media/upload/photos/composer/?av<Profile ID>&dpr=1, comes with composer_unpublished_photo[0]=<Video ID>; as one of its parameters.
The crux of the vulnerability rested with the Video ID value. All someone needed to do was change the Video ID to any other video on the social media platform. Sure, Facebook would then have responded with a server error, but the new video would have displayed just fine.
From there, an attacker could have simply deleted the video. Doing so would have removed the video from the social networking site.
Computer criminals might have any number of reasons for deleting a video off Facebook. Perhaps they work for a company and want to sabotage a marketing campaign of one of their employer’s competitors.
Alternatively, they might just be jerks and so don’t care if the world doesn’t see your toddler taking their first few steps.
Fortunately, we don’t worry to have worry about this vulnerability any longer. Facebook, patched the vulnerability a short time after Melamed reported the flaw to its security teams. A $10,000 bug bounty award shortly followed after that.
