Fergie's Tech Blog

'Misdirected Cookie' Lands Family on Strangers' Facebook Accounts

An AP newswire article by Jordan Robertson, via MSNBC.com, reports that:

A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers' accounts with full access to troves of private information.

The glitch — the result of a routing problem at the family's wireless carrier, AT&T — revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.

In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn't appear the users could have done anything to stop it. The problem adds a dimension to researchers' warnings that there are many ways online information — from mundane data to dark secrets — can go awry.

posted by Fergie @ 1/15/2010 04:51:00 PM