Facebook Implemented a New Whitehat Settings option to help bug hunters to analyze network traffic on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram Android applications.

You can enable the option from your own account for bug bounty purposes to detect server-side security vulnerabilities.

The new Whitehat Settings enables the security researchers to bypass Facebook’s Certificate Pinning security mechanism, reads the Facebook blog post.

Certificate pinning is a safe security measure to avoid the Man In Middle Attack to secure HTTPS connection. The method of pinning your trusted known certificate along with its fingerprint /serial number in a trusted store is called Certificate Pinning. You can get more details about certificate pinning here.

You can enable the Whitehat Settings option from the Facebook app, and the option is available only with Android client and not with iOS clients.

Recently Facebook increased the payout for security researchers to encourage them to find high impact Vulnerabilities. For account takeover, Facebook has a reward of up to $40,000.

Facebook recently announced that they stored hundreds of millions of user’s password in plain text instead of masking it as a human-readable format.

Learn:Mastery Web Hacking and Bug Bounty Bundle