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Facebook Glitch Let Spammer Post To Walls
angry tapir writes "A clever spammer found a glitch in Facebook's photo upload system and used it to post thousands of unwanted Wall messages last week. Facebook confirmed the bug Friday, after notifying affected users of the issue. Most of the messages promised 'Free iPhones,' a common spam message on Facebook these days. Facebook says that the spammer hit thousands of profiles before the company removed the spammy photos and notified affected users. No accounts were compromised as a result of the bug."
And to think that I thought that all of those wall postings were because of a sudden surge in my popularity...
Well, at least I'm going to get a free iPhone out of it, or so I've heard.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I'd like to consider that the insecurity settings I've applied to my account actually mean something. If an unauthorised post ends up on my wall I would consider that my account was compromised, particularly if the post was visible to others.
Yes, what could one possibly market to middle-age women interested in motherhood and holidays? And who could possibly want contact or aggregate information about this atypically independent and hard-to-sell-to demographic?
Now I understand how Debian could afford to take that prime time TV ad slot to announce the Backports service becoming official while big pharma struggled to afford the 10 second "follow-on milk" piece to target the at most half a dozen women who might be convinced that evolution is a failure and breast is not best.
With the non-stop assault on facebook by every hacker on the planet I have to ask one simple question.
Why do people put every single tidbit of info possible into the info section of their profile?
It's going to get grabbed at some point. No matter how careful you are. Either Facebook is going to change the privacy controls again, opening up another flood gate or a hack is going to allow total access to data.
I regrettably accept the fact that social networking is here to stay. No matter how satanic some of you think it is, it is now a fixture in our lives. But as in the real world I at least use some degree of caution while I use it. Do I have perfect protection. Of course not. No one does. You can get mugged in a police station these days. So no protection is perfect. But good lord some people are just begging to get electronically raped.
For example real time geo updates to your current location + putting in your address into the info tab and having no privacy settings.
This parent post is just a simple example of a breach.