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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 12 2016, @12:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the Boba-Fett-would-be-(sort-of)-proud dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A researcher has earned a significant bug bounty after finding a severe vulnerability in Facebook's Rights Manager copyright management tool.

Rights Manager is designed to allow publishers to protect their content by helping them identify videos posted on Facebook without permission. Publishers who complete an approval process can rely on the tool to specify permitted use rules, report content, and whitelist pages and profiles.

The tool was released earlier this year in response to an increase in freebooting, the act of downloading copyrighted videos from one platform (e.g. YouTube) and uploading them to a different platform (e.g. Facebook) without the copyright holder's permission.

India-based bug bounty hunter Laxman Muthiyah discovered a serious flaw in Rights Manager that could have been exploited to access and change settings in any copyright holder's account.

The expert noticed that Rights Manager uses the Graph API, which provides the primary method for apps to read and write data on Facebook. The tool's user interface relies on a Facebook-developed app whose source code contained an access token.

Muthiyah determined that this access token could have been leveraged via the Graph API to perform various actions, including access and delete videos, and modify and delete copyright rules.


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  • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday August 12 2016, @08:55AM

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 12 2016, @08:55AM (#386941) Journal
    Indeed. It is the very act of looking for the bugs that is the effort, and that should be paid. If one happens to notice a bug while doing something else, then fine cash in. However, anything else is just working for free without any return on the effort. However, the best thing that can be done with Facebook is to stop using Facebook [salimvirani.com] and even block Facebook trackers at the firewall [howtoforge.com], both the local and router firewalls.
    --
    Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
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