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FirmhandKY -> Internet Flaws (1/17/2010 12:10:48 AM)
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Network flaw causes scary Web error
Jan 15 05:12 PM US/Eastern
By JORDAN ROBERTSON
AP Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers' accounts with full access to troves of private information.
The glitch—the result of a routing problem at the family's wireless carrier, AT&T—revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.
In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn't appear the users could have done anything to stop it. The problem adds a dimension to researchers' warnings that there are many ways online information—from mundane data to dark secrets—can go awry.
Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else. It's not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. But experts said such flaws could occur on e-mail services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone.
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Stephen Simburg, 25, who works in marketing, was home for Thanksgiving in Vancouver, Wash., when he logged onto Facebook from his cell phone. He didn't recognize the people who had written him messages.
"I thought I had gotten really popular all of a sudden, or something was wrong," he said. Then he saw the picture of the account owner: A young woman.
He got her e-mail address from the site, logged off and wrote the woman a message. He asked whether he had met her at some point and she had borrowed his phone to check her Facebook account.
"No," she wrote back, "but I was just telling my family that I ended up in your profile!"
Simburg and the woman figured out they were both using AT&T to access Facebook on their phones. (AT&T had no comment because the incident wasn't reported to the company.)
Read the entire article.
Frightening stuff.
Firm
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