Incidents on Facebook

My Spanish colleague Josep Albors has also commented on recent Facebook security issues. Mistakes in translation and interpretation are, as always, mine.
The world's largest social network is a nearly inexhaustible news source: not only because it has reached 500 million users, or because it's the subject of a forthcoming film. It is also making news because of continuing incidents affecting the security and privacy of its users. The two most recent are the leaking of personal information of more than 100 million users (see also David Harley's blog here ), and the replacement of keywords by other highly impolite wording. As our colleague Sebastián Bortnik of ESET Latin America has posted, these incidents have been widely reported using imprecise terms such as hackers or "hackarillistas".
The leakage of the personal information belonging to more than 100 million unique users was not the work of an experienced hacker. illegally accessing Facebook servers to steal information. The reality was much less dramatic. Ron Bowes (researcher at the Skull Security company) was the architect of this feat, with the help of a simple application that tracked all profiles with public information on Facebook, and compiled them into a file.
Subsequently, this researcher made these data available to anyone who wanted to download them as a 2.79GB torrent file containing all the information (continue reading...)