The company addressed the issue after being notified by Mohamed Ramadan

Dec 27, 2012 13:12 GMT  ·  By

On December 21, Facebook released the 1.1.2 version of the Facebook Camera app for iOS to address a vulnerability that allowed cybercriminals to hijack user accounts by launching man-in-the-middle attacks.

Egyptian security researcher and CEO of Attack-Secure Mohamed Ramadan – the one who identified and reported the flaw to Facebook – told Softpedia that an attacker connected to the same wireless network as his victim could easily sniff the traffic and intercept account credentials.

“The problem is the app accepts any SSL certification from any source even evil SSL certs and this enables any attacker to perform Man in The Middle Attack against anyone uses Facebook Camera App for iPhone,” Ramadan explained.

“This means that the application doesn’t warn the user if someone in the same Wireless Network trying to hijack his Facebook account. This vulnerability is very dangerous because we connect to wireless networks everywhere, we can use hotel wireless service or restaurants wireless service, etc.”

In order to demonstrate his findings, the expert configured a Burp Suite proxy to listen on port 8080. The proxy was easily able to capture the email address and the password he entered when logging in to the Facebook Camera app.

For his findings, Facebook rewarded the researcher with $3,000 (2,340 EUR).

Ramadan advises Facebook Camera users to update their apps to the latest version in order to protect themselves against cybercriminal attacks that might leverage the vulnerability present in older variants.

For our readers who are not familiar with Mohamed Ramadan’s work, it’s worth mentioning that he has been listed by many companies on their security researcher “hall of fame” pages, including Zynga, Nokia Siemens Networks, Apple, SoundCloud, RedHat and Google.

More recently, he has identified a vulnerability in the iOS version of Etsy.