Facebook has been having so many security problems lately, the latest one is a bug discovered on Wednesday by a college student. The bug would allow a hacker access to accounts with the power to delete friends and more. Even though this is a serious bug, as of Saturday it was still unpatched.
The college student, Steven Abbagnaro, wrote up proof-of-concept code of an attack that would get all of a users’s publicly available data from their Facebook page and then delete their friends one by one. However, the attack can’t be started until the user clicks on a rigged link while logged into Facebook.
Abbagnaro won’t release the code until a patch is applied but competent hackers could figure it out on their own. The code is based on a previously discovered vulnerability in Facebook that doesn’t check code from user’s browsers properly to make sure they are authorized to make changes on Facebook. Another possible attack that has arisen out of this bug is the ability of hackers to make users “like” things.
This attack and the others that have been cropping up lately stresses the need to educate users about social engineering techniques and to be suspicious of links from people they don’t know or links from friends that seem uncharacteristic.
About Dinesh Mistry
