Facebook hacker who posted on Mark Zuckerberg's wall gets $12k reward from online donors Facebook refused to pay him for finding the bug since he used it to post on Mark Zuckerberg's wall An online campaign was started to reward Shreateh for his work By Joshua Gardner and Hayley Peterson The hacker who broke into Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Timeline to expose a security lapse will be awarded nearly $12,000 from an online crowdsourced campaign. The GoFundMe campaign has raised $11,741 for Khalil Shreateh, of Palestine, who claims he was forced to hack into Zuckerberg's page to bring attention to the security vulnerability because Facebook had ignored his earlier warnings. The bug that Shreateh found allowed him to post on the Timelines of people who weren't his Facebook friends. The reward for his work was arranged by Marc Maiffret, the chief technology officer of security firm BeyondTrust. 'Khalil Shreateh found a vulnerability in Facebook.com and, due to miscommunication, was not awarded a bounty for his work,' Maiffret wrote on the GoFundMe campaign page. Let us all send a message to security researchers across the world and say that we appreciate the efforts they make for the good of everyone. Facebook has a 'Bug Bounty' program that pays out at least $500 to hackers who bring software bugs to the company's attention. But the company said Shreateh would not qualify for a reward because he tested the bug against another user. Joe Sullivan, Facebook's Chief Security Officer, explained the company's decision in a post online. 'We will not change our practice of refusing to pay rewards to researchers who have tested vulnerabilities against real users,' he wrote. It is never acceptable to compromise the security or privacy of other people. In this case, the researcher could have sent a more detailed report (like the video he later published), and he could have used one of our test accounts to confirm the bug. Shreateh first contacted the Facebook security team after proving the glitch was real by writing on the wall of a friend of the Facebook founder.