October 23, 2009

Sharita Smith
Telc. 445.001
October 23, 2009
Media News Article Review
How Safe Are Facebook Applications?
Recently, Facebook executives discovered that over half a dozen Facebook applications had been compromised by malicious hackers. The hackers’ reach was small with very few users affected, executives were concerned because it was the first time they had seen apps themselves hacked as opposed to Facebook profile pages, a more commonly hacked target. This incident alone wouldn't generate too much concern because of the low-profile nature of the applications affected. It just goes to show how unsafe applications on Facebook really are. “Another researcher just spent an entire month scouring Facebook apps for security vulnerabilities and what he found is disturbing: six of the hacked apps were in the top ten, 9700 applications were affected, and the potential victims totaled 218 million users.” In the case of the hacked Facebook apps, the apps had been compromised by the use of "iframes," which are bits of code embedded in the applications themselves. The iframes were able to load content from malicious websites into the applications' pages on Facebook.com, directing app users to install software on their computers by purporting to be an update for an out-of-date Adobe Reader product. Developers of the app turned out to actually be the victims. Knowing this information, will you still use Facebook?
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/10/16/16readwriteweb-how-safe-are-facebook-applications-57362.html