Facebook fixes bug that could have deleted every single photo you ever uploaded

[mmadhankumar]

Probably, every Facebook user has dozens of photos uploaded to their account. But a recent bug on the website (issue resolved now) would have allowed hackers to completely delete them. A blogger named Laxman Muthiyah discovered the problem and reported it to Facebook and the social networking giant actually awarded him with a reward of $12,500.

Mashable shared that just by inserting the photo album’s ID number, Muthiyah was able to delete Facebook pictures which did not even belong to him. A person on the other end would have no clue why their pictures are suddenly gone and whosoever is responsible for it.

This was caused because of a flaw in Facebook’s Graph API which allowed any photo album to be deleted simply with their numbered ID. The report also added that the Graph API required a token to mess with someone’s data, but Muthiyah tricked Facebook, using his own token, into deleting other people’s pictures.

It was because of his good nature that Facebook rewarded him. The company says that the issue has now been resolved. Laxman Muthiyah also thanked the Facebook Security Team for running the bug bounty program and also for quickly fixing this issue.

Earlier, a security flaw on WhatsApp allowed anyone to track a user regardless of their privacy settings. The web based tool called ‘WhatsSpy Public’ has been designed by Maikel Zweerink, a student of Dutch University.

The software web-developer himself stated that, “I made this project for you to realise how broken the privacy options actually are. It just started out as experimenting with WhatsApp to build a bot, but I was stunned when I realised someone could abuse this “online” feature of WhatsApp to track anyone.

Facebook fixes bug that could have deleted every single photo you ever uploaded - Tech2