The unpatched bug allowed him to interact directly with Facebook’s internal servers
Facebook has awarded a bug bounty of $100,000 for a vulnerability that allowed them to run commands on the internal Facebook server, giving them control of the server.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Ben Sadeghipour said the issue was that one of the servers that Facebook used for creating and delivering ads was vulnerable to a previously fixed flaw found in the Chrome browser, which Facebook uses in its ads system.
Sadeghipour said this unpatched bug allowed him to hijack it using a headless Chrome browser (essentially a version of the browser that users run from the computer’s terminal) to interact directly with Facebook’s internal servers.
He said he didn’t test out everything he could have done once inside the Facebook server, but “what makes this dangerous is this was probably a part of an internal infrastructure.” With this level of code execution, Sadeghipour believes he could have interacted with any of the sites within that infrastructure.
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Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
