Employees Hack Facebook

7Jul/100

Don't know about you, but I love me some good ole hacking! In this case, hacking your own company. Good on you Facebook, good on you!

So, let me explain. Rather, let TechCrunch explain:

One of the senior engineers at Facebook responsible for SRE (site reliability engineering) challenged Facebook employees to try to compromise him and gain access to Facebook’s administrative system via information obtained from him.

Guess what, I am betting the senior engineer is regretting this, because the employees succeeded! Wanna know how? Well, they hacked the engineer's HOME wireless Internet. Yeah...they went all out and tracked his house to get his WPA password and after that they were able to sniff his network. After that, all passwords that flew across the network, including Facebook passwords, could be viewed in plain text by the employees. They won. Facebook lost.

The engineer responsible for starting the challenge posted on some comments, saying:

I’m the engineer who made the challenge and I want to clear up some misunderstandings. First, we perform tests on the integrity and security of our site all the time. Second, in this particular case, the challenge demonstrated the effectiveness of Facebook’s security systems, not the opposite, Despite months of work and hundreds of hours of effort by a team of specialized security engineers, the team was NOT able to access Facebook’s administrative or corporate systems. While they were able to access my personal Facebook account, they were not able to use this information to access any other account on Facebook. Finally, challenges like this are a great way for us to apply our best thinking and skills to identify risks to our systems. We think our efforts should give users greater confidence in Facebook and its administrative systems, not less.

So, will your employer let you hack them? Try it out, see how they take it. Let me know in the comments what you think of the Facebook hack and if you will try it on your own boss.