>Say they buy it for $20,000. Do you really think someone will derive $20,000 of profit from this before it's caught and patched by Facebook?
FB is publicly traded at very high volume. You can make very large bets on its movement without being noticed. A hack of 10 celebrity facebook pages could probably drop the stock 5% in one day. You'd probably be able to make at least 20 to 1 on your money using options. The right organization could clear millions.
If that were as straightforward as you claim, there would be a black market for all sorts of serverside vulnerabilities that might swing stock prices. But there isn't. One of two things is probably happening:
1. It is way less easy to predictably and profitably swing Facebook's stock than simply by hacking 10 celebrity pages.
2. For whatever reason, including the fact that crime rings premised on manipulating stocks have an annoying tendency to get caught, nobody is running this "hack Company X while sorting their stock" scam, and so even if it's possible to accomplish, the market doesn't value it.
You overestimate how much investors [and the public at large] care about this. Security issues with banks are regular occurrence - yet you don't see Chase's stock drop with every announcement of stolen CC numbers. To investors it's not worth considering unless it's catastrophic and ongoing.
FB is publicly traded at very high volume. You can make very large bets on its movement without being noticed. A hack of 10 celebrity facebook pages could probably drop the stock 5% in one day. You'd probably be able to make at least 20 to 1 on your money using options. The right organization could clear millions.