Fergie's Tech Blog

Facebook Apps On Any Website: A Clever Move? Or a Security Nightmare?

Well, given the amount of malicious JavaScript, malware, and other possibilities to use Facebook (and other similar social networking platforms) for abuse, I certainly wouldn't categorize this news as a "clever move".

The announcement says, in part, that:

...JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

In fact, I foresee this as an extraordinarily short-sighted move with far-reaching security implications -- which will allow the levels of malicious abuse to reach new heights.

In fact, minor annoyances such as this may become fond memories, as this new "feature" will allow miscreants to create much more malicious functionality.

So, this is a forecast placeholder for me -- we'll have to look back on my prediction at some point in the future to see if I'm right, or not.

- ferg

posted by Fergie @ 1/27/2008 09:12:00 AM