Researcher found a vulnerability in Facebook polls that allowed removal of any photo

The Iran-based security researcher Pouya Darabi discovered a method to delete any photo from Facebook exploiting a flaw in the polling feature.

The Iran-based security researcher Pouya Darabi received a $10,000 bounty from Facebook after reporting a critical vulnerability that could have been exploited to delete any photo from the social network.

Early this month, the social network giant announced a new feature for posting polls that include images and GIF animations. Darabi analyzed the new feature and discovered that it is affected by a vulnerability easily exploitable.

The expert analyzed the request sent to Facebook servers when a user creates a poll and discovered the presence of the identifiers of the image files added to the poll.

Replacing the image ID in the request with the ID of any photo on the social network it possible to set the image for the poll.

Darabi then discovered once the user that created the poll has deleted the post, the image whose ID was added to the request would also get removed from the social network.

“When this field value changes to any other images ID, that image will be shown in poll. After sending request with another user image ID, a poll containing that image would be created.” explained the researcher that published a video PoC.

“At the end when we try to delete the poll, victim’s image would be deleted with it by facebook as a poll property.” 

Darabi reported the flaw to Facebook on November 3, the company issued a temporary fix in the same day. The permanent fix was completed in November 5, and on November 8 the expert received a $10,000 Bounty award.

Back in 2015, Darabi was awarded $15,000 for bypassing the Facebook cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection systems, in 2016 he received another $7,500 award for a similar bug.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – polls, polling feature)

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