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Facebook Bug Could Give Spammers Names, Photos
angry tapir writes with this excerpt from an IDG report: "Facebook is scrambling to fix a bug in its website that could be misused by spammers to harvest user names and photographs. It turns out that if someone enters the e-mail address of a Facebook user along with the wrong password, Facebook returns a special 'Please re-enter your password' page, which includes the Facebook photo and full name of the person associated with the address. A spammer with an e-mail list could write a script that enters the e-mail addresses into Facebook and then logs the real names. This could help make a phishing attack more realistic."
Really? I just went to Facebook, put in my email address and a bad password in, and I see "Login as: [My full name] [my email] Not you? click here". My picture is a blank picture, but it always is because I have all pictures turned off publicly. So, if they've removed the flaw, they've either not deployed it to all their servers yet (possible), or they really did a bad job of removing it.
My security engineering text (Anderson, 2nd edition) predicted that social networking websites would become security liabilities because of the amount of personal information they store about their members. That book was published in 2007.
"We were warned?"
Palm trees and 8
``But it was a design decision, not a bug.''
Also, not telling whether they got the username correct or wrong is security 101.
This is yet another case of Facebook having done the wrong thing for their users' privacy, and correcting things only to lessen the negative publicity. It's not an accident.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I have a "good" gmail address (my full name@gmail.com) and I constantly get e-mail from other people signing up for things who apparently don't know their own e-mail address. I've received passwords and various other sensitive data. Sprint was sending me receipts for someone's very large corporate purchases, I kept replying and forwarding them to sprint's customer care and they basically told me they can't do anything about it and to just delete them and not worry about it.
It's also amazing how many sites will not let you unsubscribe without providing some kind of personal info. Seriously? They let you sign up with the wrong address without confirming it, but I can't unsubscribe unless I know the last 4 digits of the guy's SSN?
I had the same problem happen, with some extremely sensitive data coming in.
In addition to somewhat mundane things like airline confirmations, hotel confirmations, etc, there were several letters about legal problems. The person they were trying to reach is apparently the head of an investment group and under investigation by the SEC. I also once received an email containing a bank account number with routing number. Usually it was sent to his (proper) business address and CC'd to my address, which I assume they thought was a personal address for him. When correspondence from lawyers starting coming in I decided it was well past time to start emailing these people and telling them to oh my god please stop. That's a can of worms I just wanted no part of whatsoever.
I did do a quick Google search for the guy; same last name, different first name (same first initial, the combination of which is my email address). Really a problem that shouldn't have happened, especially not that many times from that many different sources.