Hacker says he'll livestream deletion of Zuckerberg's Facebook page | Hacker News Reader

Hacker says he'll livestream deletion of Zuckerberg's Facebook page

engadget.com

136 pointsonewhonknocks54 comments

He cancelled his plans to hack Mark Zuckerberg page, instead he filed a report to facebook.com/whitehat

https://twitter.com/phwd/status/1045674238751969280 https://www.facebook.com/robots.tx/posts/1198980273583188

I mean it makes sense. If he can get account access or remote execution, that's a lot of money. Unless the hacker is already pretty well off and doesn't need it, it's probably not worth the publicity stunt.

Sounds like he's getting the best of both worlds by promoting and cancelling: the publicity and the bounty.

Why take the money when you can televise your crimes? Not as if you can go to jail for that for many years.

"A white-hat hacker is promising to livestream his bid to hack into Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook account on Sunday (30th September). " That isn't white hat...

Somewhat OT, but reminded me of this classic:

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/35681-now-it-is-such-a-biza...

Oh, gosh. What a way to make sure this doesn't succeed.

You don't announce ahead of time you are doing something like this. You livestream it for maximum gotcha and shock value, make a tape of it and then have that go viral after you pulled off this wizardry.

This is like announcing you plan to break into Fort Knox on X date. Hello?!

Maybe this is a red herring/diversion and the actual attempt will occur at a totally separate time?

True, distracting the public, kind of like the first episode of Black Mirror.

This sounds like a plan to get them to act now, use that info then to execute the deletion.

While if they don't respond, he won't succeed.

Probably far fetched but seems like a cool mind game

Are you sure it's not more like announcing you plan on robbing the local gas station on X date?

What if the attacker is already in the system, and using this announcement as a probe for response and as an opportunity to harvest more info?

(ie announce server x is going to get attacked, and stand back while logged into server y and monitor where/who the increased security presence and attention is coming from, and use that to target the next sigint / humint attack)

That seems like a bit overkill for a random publicity stunt.

But a pretty solid plan for someone doing actual corporate espionage.

I hope you work for the good guys.

Fort Knox? No try again

Have you ever seen a line of a source code? Multiply that by million to arrived at Facebook size.

Clearly they wont make a source code evalution in few hours they have. This is not to say “im gonna rob wells fargo at corner of palm street and oak tomorrow at 11am”. This is to say “tomorrow at 11am i am going to rob one of 10,000 wells fargo units”.

Yeah, how about he never to intended to livestream it in the first place and just said so to gain attention

This.

Finally, a cool PHP project.

Is it even possible? I mean FB has no such feature as delete account. (I'm sarcastic here..)

This seems like an easy thing for FB to make “undeletable”.

Zuckerberg's profile is already "special." It's known that no one can block his profile, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's other stuff as well.

https://qz.com/1066804/facebook-fb-wont-let-you-block-mark-z...

That doesn't mean that this guy doesn't know about that or found a way that bypasses those application-level checks. After all, he could always just issue delete statements on the database through some SQL injection or something.

Perhaps this is where the hack is? Maybe he can ONLY hack zucks page due to its unique setup...

you can block Zuckerberg. I had already blocked Zuckerberg and just blocked Chan to see if I could.

This changed in the past year, I believe.

I think his account is special in also the sense that he has two usernames: mark and zuck. I don't think any other Facebook account has that.

So it then means that http://facebook.com/mark redirects to http://facebook.com/zuck just as http://facebook.com/4 does...

Zuckerberg would go to IT "hi guys, make a backup of my account every second and restore immediately after it is deleted, thx."

I don’t feel like Mark Zuckerberg’s account is continuously updated with crucial information. Probably updating it once every hour or two would be sufficient.

This sounds funny. You talk like a commedian. Any way to favorite this?

Seems smarter to let him do it, and watch how, with a hot backup ready for when he is done, or gone too far. Why leave this guy his 0day? So he can try again on other equally juicy targets? Using zucks is a relatively benign but powerful POC.

He's like a low rent V for Vendetta

I tried see the link to the "hacker"'s Facebook in the article and i got a "page not available", so probably there won't be a livestream from his account.....with 26000+, ah sorry, 0 followers

A part of me really wants this to succeed.

Do you think Facebook are likely to deploy any sort of additional monitoring/security around Zuckerberg's page whilst he's streaming?

Something weird happened to me when I opened https://www.facebook.com/robots.tx/posts/1198980273583188

After opening the page I hit the back button and was automatically logged out from FB. I was logged in when I opened the page initially. Anyone experienced the same?

me too

Per Google Translate, the second to last paragraph reads:

>If someone has just been logged out,

>it’s just being logged out.

>Don’t worry.

True. FB translation is not as accurate. Could it be that the logout is being forced by something in the post? If yes, that's worrying.

I believe Facebook started logging people out last night through today for some reason. Not due to any links, but it could have been related to this article.

I got logged out before opening any of these urls, so it's definitely not triggered by the post (at least not directly).

I think they logged out everyone. Starting last night actually.

no, only 90 million. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094823

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094823

I think we all know what this was about now:

Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094823

Ha, he probably wanted FB’s attention and got it. Not sure about his hacking skills but great marketing tactic :) many hackers have claimed that fb doesn’t reply or follow through on their bug findings let alone pay for it.

Stuck at the pop-up page, just no. There are now so many sites where you have to agree with over 300 companies and their terms to track you for ads... How about finding another business model? This is beyond annoying.

They're often filled with dark patterns too. I have to dig about seven pages in to turn of tracking to third parties in some of these popups.

Might be a difference with me being a European visitor though?

This is just too much work at some point. And I'm guessing the GDPR scare plays a role too for European users—and often a counter productive one at that it seems.

You can give Brave (https://brave.com/) a try. I used to play whack-a-mole with the pop-ups until I started using it exclusively for browsing the internet. Not anymore!

Likely to clone Zuck’s profile and delete that, with people rushing to FB and finding out it was a joke.

Or perhaps delete Zuck’s profile from his friended connections, maybe replacing the connection with a fake.

s/hacker/cracker/g

How much more would it cost to delete Facebook, Inc?

How much is Facebook worth overall? Buying it outright could give you that kind of power.

The argument I’m making is that Facebook isn’t actually worth its market cap. Its value is in fact negative when viewed in the larger context of humanity. So, my question sought to discover the sum of money that would become payable to whoever makes the scourge go away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com