Published in News

Facebook's security hole

by on06 May 2010

Image

Caused by security improvements


A major security hole in Facebook is self inflicted and caused by the social notworking site's security "improvements". The bug permitted some users' chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the 'preview my profile' feature of Facebook privacy settings."

Facebook said that when it received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. “We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented," Facebook said.

However with the chat system being an attack vector for hackers, it appears that Facebook did not do enough testing before the security changes were released. With the outfit already storing a huge amount of customer data, there is a fear that hacks like this will net Hackers a huge amount of personal data swag.

Rate this item
(0 votes)