Taiwanese Hacker Backs Out on Threat of Deleting Mark Zuckerberg’s Profile in Livestream

October 1, 2018

An independent white hat hacker from Taiwan is backing down from his earlier claim that he would delete Mark Zuckerberg’s own Facebook page and broadcast it live on Sunday.

Chang Chi-yuan, a minor celebrity at home with over 26,000 Facebook followers, announced his endeavor on his account earlier this week, saying he would take down the billionaire’s account at 6 p.m. local time.

“Live streaming the deletion of FB founder Zuck’s account. Scheduled to be live,” Chang wrote on Wednesday.

After receiving international attention, however, the self-professed bug bounty hunter (someone who looks for software flaws in exchange for money) made another post on Friday saying that he was canceling his plan to avoid unnecessary trouble.

“There will still be a lot of people questioning my ability even after I find many bugs and earn a copious amount of bounty, and I shouldn’t try to prove myself by toying with Zuck’s account,” he wrote.

In an interview with Bloomberg, the 24-year-old Taiwanese explained, “I am canceling my live feed, I have reported the bug to Facebook and I will show proof when I get a bounty from Facebook.”

Chang, who was named in the Japanese tech firm Line Corporation’s hall of fame of bug hunters, was once sued by a bus operator for allegedly hacking its system and buying a ticket for just 1 Taiwanese dollar (about $0.03).

Earlier this month, Chang made headlines for reportedly being able to buy 502 iPhones for less than four cents by taking advantage of a flaw in Apple’s online store. He then canceled the transaction since his objective was mainly to alert about failures in the security of the sales website.

Companies often give financial rewards to bug bounty hunters like Chang for exposing loopholes in their software and websites.

In 2015, Indian security engineer Anand Prakash was rewarded a cool $15,000 after he found a dangerous weakness in Facebook’s “Forgot Password?” algorithm that can be exploited to gain access to any profile.

Featured Image via Wikimedia Commons / Presidência do México (CC BY 2.0) (Left), YouTube / Netizen Watch (Right)

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