Information
Information
(Last updated 7 June 2017)
If you believe that you have found a security vulnerability on Facebook (or on another member of the Facebook family of companies), we encourage you to let us know straight away. We will investigate all legitimate reports and do our best to quickly fix the problem. Before reporting though, please review this page, including our responsible disclosure policy, reward guidelines and things that should not be reported.
If you are looking to report another type of issue, please use the links below for assistance.
- If your account or a friend's account is sending out suspicious links: https://www.facebook.com/help/hacked
- To report abuse: https://www.facebook.com/help/reportlinks
- For any other questions or concerns, please visit our Help Centre: https://www.facebook.com/help
- For programme updates and news from our Bug Bounty team, please Like our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/bugbounty
Responsible disclosure policy
If you comply with the policies below when reporting a security issue to Facebook, we will not initiate a lawsuit or law enforcement investigation against you in response to your report. We ask that:
- You give us reasonable time to investigate and mitigate an issue that you report before making any information about the report public or sharing such information with others.
- You do not interact with an individual account (which includes modifying or accessing data from the account) if the account owner has not consented to such actions.
- You make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations and disruptions to others, including (but not limited to) destruction of data and interruption or degradation of our services.
- You do not exploit a security issue that you discover for any reason. (This includes demonstrating additional risk, such as attempted compromise of sensitive company data or probing for additional issues.)
- You do not violate any other applicable laws or regulations.
Bug bounty programme terms
We recognise and reward security researchers who help us to keep people safe by reporting vulnerabilities in our services. Monetary bounties for such reports are entirely at Facebook's discretion, based on risk, impact and other factors. To potentially qualify for a bounty, you first need to meet the following requirements:
- Adhere to our Responsible Disclosure Policy (see above).
- Report a security bug: identify a vulnerability in our services or infrastructure which creates a security or privacy risk. (Note that Facebook ultimately determines the risk of an issue, and that many software bugs are not security issues.)
- Your report must describe a problem involving one of the products or services listed under "Bug Bounty Programme Scope" (see below).
- We specifically exclude certain types of potential security issues; these are listed under "Ineligible Reports and False Positives" (see below).
- Submit your report via our "Report a Security Vulnerability" form (one issue per report) and respond to the report with any updates. Please do not contact employees directly or through other channels about a report.
- If you inadvertently cause a privacy violation or disruption (such as accessing account data, service configurations or other confidential information) while investigating an issue, make sure that you disclose this in your report.
- Use test accounts when investigating issues. If you cannot reproduce an issue with a test account, you can use a real account (except for automated testing). Do not interact with other accounts without consent (e.g. do not test against Mark Zuckerberg's account).
In turn, we will follow these guidelines when evaluating reports under our bug bounty programme:
- We investigate and respond to all valid reports. Due to the volume of reports that we receive, however, we prioritise evaluations based on risk and other factors, and it may take some time before you receive a reply.
- We determine bounty amounts based on a variety of factors, including (but not limited to) impact, ease of exploitation and quality of the report. If we pay a bounty, the minimum reward is USD 500. Note that extremely low-risk issues may not qualify for a bounty at all.
- We seek to pay similar amounts for similar issues, but bounty amounts and qualifying issues may change over time. Past rewards do not necessarily guarantee similar results in the future.
- In the event of duplicate reports, we award a bounty to the first person to submit an issue. (Facebook determines duplicates and may not share details on the other reports.) A given bounty is only paid to one individual.
- You may donate a bounty to a recognised charity (subject to approval by Facebook) and we double bounty amounts that are donated in this way.
- We reserve the right to publish reports (and accompanying updates).
- We publish a list of researchers who have submitted valid security reports. You must receive a bounty to be eligible to be included in this list, but your participation is then optional. We reserve the right to limit or modify the information accompanying your name in the list.
- We verify that all bounty awards are permitted by applicable laws, including (but not limited to) US trade sanctions and economic restrictions.
Note that your use of Facebook services and the services of any member of the Facebook family of companies, including for the purposes of this programme, is subject to Facebook's Terms and Policies and the terms and policies of any member of the Facebook family of companies whose services you use. We (and any member of the Facebook family of companies that is the subject of your report) may retain any communications about security issues that you report for as long as we deem necessary for programme purposes, and we may cancel or modify this programme at any time.
Bug bounty programme scope
To qualify for a bounty, report a security bug in Facebook or one of the following qualifying products or acquisitions:
- Atlas
- Instagram
- Internet.org/Free Basics
- Moves
- Oculus
- Onavo
- Open-source projects by Facebook (e.g. osquery)
- WhatsApp
Note that services not owned by Facebook (e.g. WordPress VIP and Page.ly) are not eligible under our bug bounty programme. While we often care about vulnerabilities affecting services that we use, we cannot guarantee that our disclosure policies apply to services from other companies.
Specific examples of programme scope
If you are unsure whether a service is eligible for a bounty or not, please feel free to ask us. Below are some specific examples of eligible and ineligible apps and websites to help guide your research.
| Target | Eligible | Ineligible |
|---|---|---|
| Websites: facebook.com, fb.com, fb.me, messenger.com, thefacebook.com Apps: Adverts Manager, Facebook, Facebook Lite, Workplace by Facebook, Groups, Hello, Mentions, Messenger, Moments, Pages Manager, Paper (by Facebook), Work Chat | Websites: events.fb.com, fbsbx.com, investor.fb.com, media.fb.com, newsroom.fb.com, search.fb.com, work.fb.com Apps: Facebook for Blackberry, Facebook for Windows | |
| Atlas | Websites: app.atlassolutions.com | Websites: atlassolutions.com (no subdomain), atdmt.com, atlassbx.com |
| Websites: instagram.com Apps: Boomerang, Hyperlapse, Instagram, Layout | Websites: blog.instagram.com | |
| Internet.org | Websites: freebasics.com, internet.org Apps: Free Basics | |
| Moves | Websites: moves-app.com Apps: Moves | |
| Oculus | Websites: oculus.com | Websites: answers.oculus.com, forums.oculus.com, support.oculus.com |
| Onavo | Websites: onavo.com Apps: Onavo Count, Onavo Extend, Onavo Protect | Websites: Websites: blog.onavo.com |
| Open Source | Code repos https://github.com/facebook/ | |
| Websites: blog.whatsapp.com, translate.whatsapp.com, web.whatsapp.com, whatsapp.net, www.whatsapp.com Apps: WhatsApp | Websites: alpha.whatsapp.com, media.whatsapp.com | |
| Other partnerships/acquisitions | Websites: daytum.com, drop.io, face.com, friendfeed.com, monoidics.com, opencompute.org and spaceport.io Services (websites and apps): LiveRail |
Out of scope
- Spam or social engineering techniques.
- Denial-of-service attacks.
- Content injection. Posting content on Facebook is a core feature, and content injection (also "content spoofing" or "HTML injection") is ineligible unless you can clearly demonstrate a significant risk.
- Security issues in third-party apps or on websites that integrate with Facebook (including most pages on apps.facebook.com). These are not managed by Facebook and do not qualify under our guidelines for security testing.
- Executing scripts on sandboxed domains (such as fbrell.com or fbsbx.com). Using alert(document.domain) can help verify whether the context is actually *.facebook.com.
False positives
- Open redirects. Any redirect using our "linkshim" system is not an open redirect (learn more).
- Profile pictures available publicly. Your current profile picture is always public (regardless of size or resolution).
- Note that public information also includes your username, ID, name, current cover photo, gender and anything that you've shared publicly (learn more).
- Sending messages to anyone on Facebook (learn more).
- Accessing photos via raw image URLs from our CDN (Content Delivery Network). One of our engineers has posted a more detailed explanation (external link).
- Non-case-sensitive passwords. We accept the "caps lock" version of a password or a password with the first character capitalised to avoid login problems.
- Missing attribution on page posts. We generally show page admins which admin created a post, but this is not a security control.