Facebook CEO's personal profile hacked
02:46 - Source: CNN

Story highlights

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personal page was hacked to make a point

Palestinian researcher says security team didn't take his reports seriously

Facebook says volume of reports, language barrier hindered its response

Khalil Shreateh won't get a reward for reporting the flaw

CNN  — 

He tried to warn them.

A Palestinian researcher posted a message on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s page last week after he says the site’s security team didn’t take his warnings about a security flaw seriously.

“First, sorry for breaking your privacy and post(ing) to your wall,” wrote Khalil Shreateh. “I (have) no other choice to make after all the reports I sent to (the) Facebook team.”

Shreateh, who describes himself as an unemployed security researcher with a degree in information systems, said he found a hole in Facebook’s systems that let him post to any user’s page, including users not on his Friends list.

Such an exploit would be a virtual gold mine for spammers, scam artists and others seeking to take advantage of the site’s roughly 1 billion users worldwide.

Shreateh said he contacted Facebook security about the vulnerability before using it to post to Mark Zuckerberg's page.

On his blog, Shreateh posted a series of e-mails he said were exchanged between him and Facebook security. After the first one, a Facebook employee responded that the link he attached was bad.