AP Photo/Jeff ChiuIt looks as if Facebook wound up with a bit of egg on its, well, face.
Palestinian security researcher Khalil Shreateh hacked into and posted a message on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's page last week to prove there was a security flaw with the social media site, ABC News reports.
"First, sorry for breaking your privacy and post(ing) to your wall, I (had) no other choice to make after all the reports I sent to (the) Facebook team," Shreateh wrote on Zuckerberg's wall.
Shreateh's post came after he repeatedly reported the bug—that essentially allowed people to post something on a non-friend's timeline—through Facebook's White Hat Security team. However, he was initially told that "this is not a bug."
Sure enough, when he decided to leave the message on Zuckerberg's page, as well as post a YouTube video showing exactly how he did it, Shreateh finally got the response he was looking for.
Facebook fixed the flaw, but the company insisted that Shreateh's initial report was not ignored. It simply did not have enough information at the time.
"We should have asked for additional repro [reproduction] instructions after his initial report," Facebook software engineer Matt Jones wrote on Hacker News. "Unfortunately, all he submitted was a link to the post he'd already made ... Had he included the video initially, we would have caught this much more quickly."