The program has been successful beyond our expectations. First, it really blew up the assumption that there are only a small number of quality researchers able and willing to report meaningful bugs. On the contrary, we have found that there is an incredibly vibrant entrepreneurial security community around the world that is passionate about engaging on web application security.

We have had submissions from over 16 countries and have already payed out over $150, 000 in bounties. In the process we have built great relationships with some amazing researchers from every corner of the globe. And yes, we do have a summer intern coming who we met through the program.

I don't think it has influenced the way we review code, but it does make us feel even better about the overall review process we have in place being as complete as possible. We intend to keep investing in this program and are always looking for feedback on how to make it better.

Our latest iteration was to add a debit card as a payment option so that we can reload easily for people who submit bugs regularly.

As the number of Facebook users grows seemingly exponentially, does your security team as well? What security-related problems currently give you the biggest headaches?


We do continue to grow in size, but we are also constantly challenging ourselves to develop in such a way that every employee focused on security has a greater individual impact tomorrow than that person did today. We can do that both by continuing to innovate on our approaches to security and investing in system and infrastructure.

We know that we will always be out-numbered by the bad guys, but we can overcome that by making sure that our systems are up to the challenge. An example of how things change and new headaches arise the sudden increase in what we call self-XSS during last year. Self-XSS attacks used social engineering to trick users into copying-and-pasting malicious javascript into their browser, thereby self-propagating the spam and evading our detection systems. Before the attacks increased dramatically most experts would have doubted that a social engineering scheme could work at such scale.

Fortunately, we reacted quickly and have had success beating it back. In addition to improving internal detection mechanisms, we have worked with browser vendors to make it harder for spammers to take advantage of this vulnerability in the browser, and we have partnered with external companies to make our malicious link detection system more robust. We are still battling this but thankfully it is much less of a headache than it use to be.

I can't remember the last time I saw a bogus or information-collecting app being pushed onto users by third party developers, and I recall them being plentiful at one point in time. How did you solve that particular problem?