BENGALURU: The lesser known contentious vulnerability of the social media giant Facebook has been exposed by a techie recently. The contact number based profile search feature of Facebook allows its users to find any profile by typing in contact number of account holder. This feature can prove helpful in finding profile of which E-mail ID and other details are not known. However the search engine indentifies the profile only if its contact number is not privacy controlled, as reported by NDTV gadgets.
Reza Moaiandin, the Technical Director of Salt, identified the flaw in Facebook subsequently developed a tool to aimlessly generate various phone numbers and try to find a related profile registered with the particular number in Facebook. Surprisingly, in a short period of time, the tool recovered profile picture, name, and further openly disclosed information of numerous Facebook users.
Moaiandin said “It's like walking into a bank, asking for a few thousand customers' personal information based on their account number, and the bank telling you: Here are their customer details."
Reportedly, Facebook has ignored Moaiandin’s complaint twice in April and the other time in July, the complaint suggested Facebook to clinch its flaws and to add supplementary layer of security. Nevertheless Facebook defied to call it as a flaw and refused to make any changes in its contact number based profile search.
Facebook did not hint on any possible changes that could be made in the future .Moaiandin added "We do not consider it security vulnerability, but we do have controls in place to monitor and mitigate abuse."
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