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Comment by Qualman | Hacker News Reader

Bug bounty appears to be a misnomer in this instance. Facebook is specifically asking for reports of security vulnerabilities in their policy:

> If you believe you have found a security vulnerability on Facebook, we encourage you to let us know right away.[1]

Which then begs the question to me: how do you differentiate an acceptable and unacceptable probing of security vulnerabilities when you can't capture the full impact of an issue without attempting to exploit it to its fullest? Because it is certainly not outlined in their policy.

And when you're asking for any whitehat to attempt to discover and disclose security vulnerabilities in your system with only the limpest of guidelines around how to do so, I don't feel that it is warranted to react such as Facebook has here.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/whitehat

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I don't know. I feel bad for Alex but if we want to suggest that Facebook's vulnerability disclosure policy was poorly written, I will ruefully agree.

When you stand up a bug bounty program, you are giving strangers permission to do something that they would otherwise be prosecuted for doing. You should be extraordinarily careful when you do that, and your rules of engagement should be crystal clear. These weren't.

EDIT: Having read the CSO's explanation that the guy was using his company work email, it makes more sense why the CSO would contact the company (and explains away the pettiness my comment was referring to)

One thing I notice: if the CSO felt like this person did something grossly illegal and irresponsible, why not go straight to the police? Why instead go to the man's employer and speak passively aggressively?

Paradoxically, contacting the authorities could have helped facebook's argument. It would communicated to the community at large: "Hey Facebook believes it has clear standing to pursue this guy. Maybe, he really did do something wrong."

Instead, what I'm reading is: "Facebook doesn't actually believe what the guy did was illegal per se... but they wanted to spite the guy anyway."

For me, it seems petty.

Zero is the number of people on HN who would feel better about this situation if Alex Stamos had referred this person to the police to be prosecuted under CFAA.

The researcher has already updated his post regarding the use of his company email. Apparently your original point still stands:

> I never contacted Facebook or Alex using my work email account. It was only after Alex contacted my employer via email that I sent a reply from my work account. Alex indirectly contacted me at work, not the other way around.

Also, why would he be doing this work at the behest of his employer when (IIRC) Facebook's bounty program only pays out to individuals? It would automatically make him ineligible to claim the bounty.

To me it seems like Alex Stamos tried to use some good old threaten-your-livelihood intimidation tactics and failed miserably.

I commented earlier to sort of the same effect, and was thinking a little more about this.

I don't think the goal, or desire, is to be told the full extent or impact of a problem. The goal is to be alerted to spots that may lead to a large problem, or re in and of themselves a large problem.

This seems like it has a few facets to it. You end up reducing the space of things to mostly "ways to get in the front door." Thinking about it, I would probably be frustrated, in general, if I knew someone had important keys to the kingdom I was in charge of. It doesn't change the fact that others may or may not have also gotten the same access, now it's 1-* instead of 0-* people who have it and shouldn't.

I'm still slightly skeptical on the bounty reward itself. This was a simple exploit that got pivoted into some major shit, so do you reward the exploit of the logical conclusion of the exploit? I lean towards the latter, but again, as you said... how do you figure out the impact without... actually trying to figure out the impact?

Bug bounties are an interesting concept, to be sure. -

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