Search Results for "Privacy"

PRISM Watch: US Cyber Command Chief Addresses Black Hat

I’m here at the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas, the U.S.’s most prominent “hacker con.” I’ll be bringing you news and updates from the show and (a bit) from DEFCON for the remainder of the week.   As for the Briefings – the long and short of things is that all the buzz right now is about General Keith Alexander’s keynote speech this morning. Of course, keynotes are always a big deal, but its not even 8:00 AM and there’s a bit of a crush in the press room, with TV crews from major media outlets setting up in the Augustus ballroom, where Alexander will speak. Why? This speech is big because its one of the first – if not the first – post-PRISM public address by Gen. Alexander, who is the Commander of U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) since the leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden burst into the […]

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Six Hours, $4500: The Short Life and Quick Death Of A Facebook Bug

A security researcher based in Indonesia disclosed yet another Facebook bug this weekend – one that would allow an attacker to obtain the primary e-mail address associated with any Facebook account. Hours after informing the social network about the bug, however, it was closed and the researcher, Roy Castillo, was $4,500 richer. Castillo, a white hat vulnerability researcher based in The Philippines, disclosed the bug in Facebook’s Developer Application Roles Page in a post on his blog on Saturday.  When exploited, it allowed an attacker to discover the primary Facebook email address of any account – even those with the email privacy setting on “Only Me,” Castillo wrote.   Attackers would need a Facebook Developer account and some basic programming knowledge to take advantage of the vulnerability, in which Facebook mistakenly disclosed the e-mail address associated with a unique Facebook user ID. After discovering the buy on June 25th, Castillo […]

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Security Must-Do’s For Facebook Graph Search

Facebook finally pulled the covers off its much-anticipated (or dreaded) Graph Search feature on Monday, after about six months in beta. The new search feature greatly expands the kinds of information Facebook users can access on other users of the social network, making it easy, for example, to cross reference data stored in Facebook profiles. For example, users can easily call up a list of their “friends who live in Boston” and like the show “Arrested Development.” Fun! But, as has been noted, Graph Search is also a social engineer’s dream, because it lays bare lots of information – data – that Facebook users shared, casually, and without a thought of how it might be used in combination with other data they shared. For example, researchers have shown that they can use knowledge of a Facebook user’s “Likes” to “automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: […]

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More Questions For Facebook On Extent Of Ghost Profiles

The security firm that disclosed a security hole in a Facebook feature that allows users to download their own data file says the social network giant still has questions to answer about the extent of the data breach. Writing on their blog, researchers at Packet Storm Security said that Facebook has underestimated the extent of the breach, which affected around six million users of the social networking site and an unknown number of non-Facebook users. Packet Storm says that Facebook’s analysis of the breach failed to account for ways in which it could be exploited, in an iterative fashion, to glean information on Facebook users beyond the individual pieces of data that may have been viewed by users who used the Download Your Information (DYI) feature. The firm also called Facebook to task for failing to notify non-users whose information was exposed in the incident. On Monday, Security Ledger wrote […]

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Facebook Mum On Future Of Ghost User Accounts

Facebook acknowledged on Friday that a flaw in a feature that lets users download their own profile information exposed personal information on approximately six million users, including phone numbers and e-mail addresses that were not shared with the site, but is staying mum on the future of wide ranging information harvesting practices revealed by the bug. In a blog post, the social networking giant said the security hole was disclosed by an independent security researcher and forced the company to disable the Download Your Information (DYI) feature until it could be fixed. Despite the large number of people affected, Facebook said individual pieces of private data like an e-mail address or telephone number were only exposed to one or two other Facebook users. However, Facebook has not said whether it will cease using non-public data from users’ contacts to fill out dossiers on other Facebook users, a practice that has […]

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