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Researcher Hijacks LinkedIn Profiles Using Cookie

Posted by Unknown on from the xeroxing-your-business-cards dept.

mask.of.sanity writes "A security researcher has demonstrated holes in the way cookies are handled on LinkedIn profiles by hijacking profiles. The session cookies are sent over unsecured HTTP and remain active for up to a year."

2 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. LinkedIn is worthless by Hazel+Bergeron · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    If you want to work for someone and do a good job, you demonstrate skill.

    If your skill is insufficient, you network and gain favours from "friends".

    If you fail at socialising, you post your profile on LinkedIn.

    If you're still not happy with yourself, you use LinkedIn to compare cock size and actually check other people's profiles.

    1. Re:LinkedIn is worthless by Hazel+Bergeron · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      No, skill is the number one way to get employment. Level/advancement is part of getting employment - unless you're being obtuse and counting anything whatever which pays (and no-one at McDonalds reads your LinkedIn profile).

      If you do cool things in your field, you will gain a reputation which will put you in demand. If are not already heard of, you can show what you have done. Publish first, publish/perish, etc. Your CV will list your qualifications and provide pointers to any portfolio.

      The number 2 way is networking, which has some value in terms of trusting personal recommendations but is mainly just humans demonstrating the usual primate social behaviour and favouring their group for its own sake.

      And number 3 is poor substitutes for networking such as LinkedIn. So, it's like I said in my initial post - which will be angrily modded down because everyone with a LinkedIn profile is embarrassed to be a number 3.

      LinkedIn is becoming one of the first places people check when they are thinking of hiring you.

      Maybe the people you work with. Anyone who uses such masturbatory nonsense to judge you (or the person you claim to be, or the person someone else claims to be you) is going to be a terrible employer. It's even worse than people who use your Facebook profiles to judge you, because at least there's the small chance that the Facebook profile wasn't simply engineered to get you a better job than you're cut out for.

      LinkedIn is popular today because everyone's desperately seeking employment, perhaps preemptively. Desperation often results in irrational behaviour. The problem is that there's not enough work to go around because we're organised/sufficiently advanced such that we can get along just fine working fewer hours. We should be spreading the work around more evenly, not clamouring like whores for more pointless things to do. Go against a whole society's worth of divide-and-conquer indoctrination and consider a little less competition and a little more cooperation.