Hacking

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 pollAfter 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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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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