When I was young I was devious, malicious and didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. I was 13 at the time, I had recently gotten the hang of PHP and built a social network for my school from scratch but this isn’t about that, this is about a hack.

So I was looking at Sean Parkers Facebook Profile Page and reading some posts on it when I spontaneously decided to send him a friend request just for fun knowing that nothing would come of it. A few hours later I get a notification saying the friend request is accepted. I was ecstatic. I tried sending him messages saying hi but he wouldn’t see them or reply. The excitement then passed for a few days until I posted a funny meme and tagged some of my friends and Sean Parker in the post, because he is technically my friend now.

Thousand likes. I got a thousand likes on the post. To a normal 13 year old on social media who usually gets a max of 30 likes, a thousand likes is beyond ones imagination. But I wouldn’t call myself a normal 13 year old, being the devious kid I was, I saw an opportunity. With such a large reach and with the reach being Sean Parker, the president of Facebook’s followers, I could use this to my advantage. I set up a phishing page on my web server, which is basically a clone of the facebook login page, except when a user enters their username and password, I wrote a simple PHP script where their login details are conveniently sent to me. I then posted a link to it on my Facebook saying, “Hey guys check out this new version of Facebook!”, tagging Sean Parker, the president of Facebook. Five seconds after I posted I refreshed the text file that would have the login details. Nothing. Ten seconds. Nothing again. It didn’t work.     I reloaded again. One hundred lines, with login details of Sean Parker’s following. Five seconds later. Another hundred. I was overwhelmed. I closed my mini HP laptop and started wondering why I did this in the first place. I couldn’t understand why then but I do now, I did it simply because I could, not taking a moment to see if it was right or wrong. I opened my laptop again and I see a blip in the messages section on Facebook notifying me that I have a private message. It was Sean Parker.