The False Promise of Security?
25 03 2008According to AP, the private photographs of celebrity Paris Hilton and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg have been exposed by a Vancouver, Canada computer technician namely Byron Ng. Ng was reported that he has started to look for the Facebook security weaknesses since last week and surely he found his way to access to some Facebook private photos that were supposedly be protected. It was a serious blow to Facebook as they just launched two new security features which include a “Friends of Friends” privacy option last week. It seemed like for some unscrupulous hackers, the tricks they’re manipulating could helped them in divulge personal information of all the Facebook users, including you and me. That is sad, and identified as a predictor that Facebook is still not at its best to protect the valuable users’ data.
Though Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said Facebook was patched the bug after the security alert within an hour, this is neither the first time nor the last time a Facebook photo flaw can be found on the Web. A blog called laatedaa has published a post on the issue of Facebook private photos code in January. On that blog, a user can simply follow the instructions and enter the Web address, she is allowed to access to somebody’s Facebook private photo albums. (Update: A most latest comment showed that the code doesn’t work anymore)
Nonetheless, that such security flaw happen is alarming. We, as the Facebook users didn’t have much choice in preventing the revelation of data.
via [AP]
