Scary Facebook Security Glitch or Bad Software?
As if there hasn't been enough publicity about the security evils of Facebook, this one is really off the wall. In this case, a woman from Georgia and her two daughters wound up in the account of some strangers when logging onto Facebook from their mobile phones.
All kinds of private information was exposed about the strangers. And, AT&T, the wireless provider for the family's mobile phones, said the glitch was due to a "routing problem," according to this news item two hours ago from the Associated Press.
The issue has far reaching implications beyond Facebook, since other sites, not just the famous social networking site, could be affected by such routing errors.
Basically, the issue wasn't due to problems with the Facebook web site, but possibly poorly configured network equipment and poorly coded network software. The issue might be hard for a hacker to exploit, since the routing error was random and one-off, something hard for a malicious user to engineer.
Interestingly enough, Facebook announced a partnership this week with McAfee to offer security software.
All kinds of private information was exposed about the strangers. And, AT&T, the wireless provider for the family's mobile phones, said the glitch was due to a "routing problem," according to this news item two hours ago from the Associated Press.
The issue has far reaching implications beyond Facebook, since other sites, not just the famous social networking site, could be affected by such routing errors.
Basically, the issue wasn't due to problems with the Facebook web site, but possibly poorly configured network equipment and poorly coded network software. The issue might be hard for a hacker to exploit, since the routing error was random and one-off, something hard for a malicious user to engineer.
Interestingly enough, Facebook announced a partnership this week with McAfee to offer security software.
posted by The IT Security Guy at 6:01 PM
2 Comments:
This is just another reason why one should refrain from putting sensitive information on social networking site. Not withstanding the supposed "privacy settings", your information is just error away from being exposed.
I have also seen the stupidity of FB. When facebook introduced the Live Feeds option a couple of months back, i disliked it in the first sight. Only yesterday I found in my live feeds that a friend of mine liked someone's picture. When i went to that person's profile to check the picture it was private and not visible to people who are not friends with that person, but the same picture was available in my live feeds. What a crap, people can't secure their privacy because of live feeds. I think FB should put back the older version that didnot have live feeds.
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