Sep 22, 2020 05:37 PM (This post was last modified: Sep 22, 2020 05:41 PM by Mr. Robot.)
Do you think it's plausible to get enough people to spam posts on FB with high amounts of data to flood their storage until they ran out of room?
Find the max amount of bytes you can put in a single post and then repeat - with enough people it could cause some harm.
Looking at Facebooks video section:
We support file sizes up to 10 GB, there may be longer upload times associated with larger files on slower Internet connections.
With 10,000 people that would be 100tb -
100,000 people that would be 1 petabyte
Multiplying that by each person doing more than 1x 10gb file a day - say 3 each that's 3 petabyte per day.
(Sep 22, 2020 05:56 PM)Casual Wrote: You also have to take into account how Facebook encodes and compresses the video. They definitely don't keep that original 10GB video file.
If you could upload faster than they could setup new hardware I guess it's possible :p
It's just a thought experiment of course - but on smaller sites hosting storage is limited so finding ways to flood/fill could be useful.
Sep 22, 2020 06:17 PM (This post was last modified: Sep 22, 2020 06:18 PM by Lindros.)
There was a bug/glitch with Myspace that allowed someone to get some higher access permissions with a script to automatically add friends or something.
Anyways, his friends grew exponentially so quickly that it took Myspace offline. The kid at the time faced I think criminal charges and monetary damages as a result of this.
I'm fuzzy on the details, that's just what I remember from it. I'm sure you can find the story.
EDIT:
Sep 22, 2020 06:23 PM (This post was last modified: Sep 22, 2020 06:24 PM by Semmenial.)
That's definitely possible, but I'm sure they have some sort of filter in place to prevent the capacity of the site to be reached.
Probably some sort of system where -> if xxx,xxx GB is reached -> temporarily disable posting of videos.
Although it's possible, FaceBook being the business it is, they definitely have measures in place for situations like this. (IMO) (taking into account the demand of high speed internet of thousands of users).
Always PM/Convo me before attempting to communicate with me off-site.
Enjoy your day.
(Sep 22, 2020 06:23 PM)Semmenial Wrote: That's definitely possible, but I'm sure they have some sort of filter in place to prevent the capacity of the site to be reached.
Probably some sort of system where -> if xxx,xxx GB is reached -> temporarily disable posting of videos.
FaceBook being the business that it is, this may not be possible (taking into account the demand of high speed internet of thousands of users).
I think that might depend on past experiences and if they faced something in the earlier days to require implementing.
(Sep 22, 2020 06:24 PM)Mr. Robot Wrote: I think that might depend on past experiences and if they faced something in the earlier days to require implementing.
Absolutely, but crashing with such method of uploading huge files to the server is nothing new to cyber professionals. It has been performed for years now and it is probably a huge concern for the cyber security professionals at Facebook to ensure such a simple attack cannot be taken to the next level and crash the site.
BUT, I still think there is a chance it could be performed, in the scenario that Facebook relies on forecasts based on previous data to predict the storage requirements for video/photo/whatever uploads. In that scenario, they wouldn't expect 100s and 100s of extra terabytes of video uploads forcing it's way into their storage.
Always PM/Convo me before attempting to communicate with me off-site.
Enjoy your day.
Intentionally? I don't think there can be a sudden or unintentionally crashing after all it is the biggest social network in the world. but anyway I will rather plan well for the crashing and own credit for it.