Sources detail Facebook's extraordinary efforts to help the FBI track down a repeat child predator, paying a cybersecurity firm six figures for a Tails zero-day
For years, a California man systematically harassed and terrorized young girls using chat apps, email, and Facebook. Tweets: @lorenzofb , @kimzetter , @kimzetter , @iblametom , and @lorenzofb Tweets: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / @lorenzofb : New: Facebook helped the FBI hack a child predator and sextortionist. The social media giant paid a cybersecurity firm six figures to develop a zero-day exploit to help the FBI unmask a serial child predator that was using Facebook to terrorize girls. https://www.vice.com/... Kim Zetter / @kimzetter : Great story. And nice exploit. “Facebook worked with a third-party company to develop the exploit and did not directly hand the exploit to the FBI.” The exploit attacked a flaw in video player of Tails operating system to reveal real IP address of someone viewing a video. https://twitter.com/... Kim Zetter / @kimzetter : More good details from story: Facebook assigned a dedicated employee to track the perpetrator for 2 yrs and developed a new machine-learning system designed to detect users creating new accounts and reaching out to kids in an attempt to exploit them. Thomas Brewster / @iblametom : I often wonder if apps like Kik, where child exploitation is a real problem, do the same as this. https://twitter.com/... Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / @lorenzofb : This was the first and, so far, only time Facebook helped the FBI in such a way, according to several sources. The man they went after was horrible, but the decision was, and is, controversial. https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...