Social Networking Sites Full of Security Holes

athloi writes "Social networking Web sites such as MySpace.com are increasingly juicy targets for computer hackers, who are demonstrating a pair of vulnerabilities they claim expose sensitive personal information and could be exploited by online criminals."

Hey...Wait a minute

First a story about how restrictive social networking sites are.

Now, so many holes in social networking sites your data is already in the hands of criminals.

Re:Hey...Wait a minute

It's VERY Restrictive Swiss Cheese. Kinda like Windows ME.

"It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up"

I laughed at this juxtaposition, too!

Hey, site vulnerabilities are an API! Right?

XSS is Web 3.0. ;-)

Re:Hey...Wait a minute

Hey, you gotta give 'em credit for a quick turnaround on the openness issue...Only took 'em three hours (according to story submission time) to go from closed to too open.

In the end it's hardly surprising. These sites aren't designed with security in mind, and they allow user code on the pages. Game over man, game over. Blah blah blah SSL, blah blah blah strong passwords, blah blah blah restrict user code...This stuff is all basic.

My God....It's full of holes!

Of course it's full of holes. How else would it connect to the series of tubes?

Re:My God....It's full of holes!

Of course it's full of holes.

They probably meant assholes. That would make more sense.

I'd say the real threat isn't holes, but ho's

It wasn't a security hole that allowed someone to blackmail Miss New Jersey [gawker.com]. The real danger of these networking sites are dumbasses who post embarassing pictures and blogs about themselves IN THE OPEN, not anything a hacker needs to dig for.

Re:I'd say the real threat isn't holes, but ho's

Yes, but assume that some sites DO implement security features like only allowing your data to be shown to your "buddies". What happens when these security measures get broken?

The other day i could watch a demonstration of a XSS attack on meebo due to lack of server-side validation.

Now add a little AI / data mining to this:

(New entry, mo/day/yr) "Here's a picture of me and my daughter Jessica playing on the NN. park" -> AI -> name: Jessica. Picture: (insert here). Last seen on: MMDDYY. Location: NN. Park.

There! You could make a database of potential victims for threats, blackmailing, and what not. The only thing that makes me feel safe is that such AI data mining technology hasn't been developed... yet.

As a rule of thumb, follow Murphy's law: What can go wrong, WILL go wrong (remember the recent SSN leaks?) Unless social networking sites have been PUBLICLY certified as having greater security than Fort Knox, stay away.

Perhaps ran into one of these

My girlfriend's MySpace page became hijacked fairly recently and was forced to post advertisements for some website. Needless to say, she knows better than to give out her username and password to any website. I also called up namecheap.com, the domain provider and complained about the website that was being advertised. Nothing will probably be done, and how this happened will probably remain a mystery. I've always wondered if myspace actually uses a challenge token to log in, and if all it takes is a replay attack to log in.

Re:Perhaps ran into one of these

It's almost always cookie cloning or password theft...That's the devil deal with Javascript, and allowing people to put their own widgets on their pages. Set up some XSS stuff [wikipedia.org], or just make a shiny widget and put in on your page and use it to snag cookie info.

Not much you can do about it other than turn of javascript by default. It's pretty annoying actually...These vulnerablities have been known forever, but patching them would break a lot of code, so they stay open.

Applause

I, for one, applaud these social networking sites' quick response to the call to "open up".

Whew! I'm Glad I'm a 15-year-old girl!

Fortunately, I'm only logged into those sites as a 15-year-old girl from Kansas with a dog named Toto.

At least I don't think they can get to me!

Re:Whew! I'm Glad I'm a 15-year-old girl!

Oh, they'll get to you.

And your little dog, too.

A Net is a Bunch of Holes Sewn Together

Is giving your personal data to a company that sells it to spammers or anyone else with a buck when they start going bankrupt a "security hole"?

i wouldn't be surprised

i wouldn't be surprised to find out that most of the hacked accounts had passwords that were something that was listed under the favorite things on a user's profile.

I know, and they keep sending me Friend requests

Oh, wait a second, you said 'Holes'. Oh. Carry on, then...

Security Holes?

I thought it said "Social Networking Sites Full of Assholes".

perverts?

So how long till the "exploiting of the holes" gets taken out of context by parents and we're doomed to another discussion of "think of the children" and "sexual predators in the tubes".

No SSL

How can anyone expect to keep their myspace login credentials private when they don't even have the login page SSL'd? Those bunch of retards!

'increasingly juicy targets'

I'm guessing if you're searching MySpace for "juicy", then YES... you'll probably see more than a few 'security holes'. That's just the risk you take, as a user of The_Internet.

/haven't tried, myself

Stereotyping?

"Yet another MySpace security hole" somehow translates to "All social networking sites are full of holes"?

Just a LITTLE bit of stereotyping in the article title I think?

They really don't care about the end user...

What I find funny is the fact that most of the poor souls that go to such sites looking to connect with other people are on a site where the people in charge couldn't care less... I signed up for My(waste of)Space when it showed up on the net because for some people I knew it was the only means to reach them any longer. I canceled my ISP and switched since then, asking the OZ like people running the show to please update my e-mail to reflect this change, more than a year has gone by. Has my e-mail been changed? Nope. Do I waste my time on MySpace anymore? Nope.

When you refuse to acknowledge the community you "support" sub-par quality is what you must expect. Now if those MySpace people want to reach me they have to track me down via other means. To limit yourself to one medium of communication is sad anyway. Pidgin for everybody.

Full of holes? No problem...

This error has been sent to myspace.com's technical department.

I'm sure Tom will get right on it.

A patch has been issued

Get the end users to install curtains and a dog.

Myspace hole that's funny

There's a feature where in Myspace you can set all your pictures to "private". But most idiots on myspace insist on having a myspace slide show on their profile page(along with 2000 other flash applets). Click on the picture in the slideshow, now you can see the album! Just use previous/next to navigate through them.

Then there was the time I was on myspace, and a banner ad tried to send me a virus. You would think Myspace would be a bit more discretionary who it lets send banners over. Tsk tsk!

Of course, not as fun as the images directory being left open on all angelfire pages. Some of those were fun to sort through, showing pictures not intended for the public(ie nudity, etc).

News?

More like olds. This is like complaining that geocities is full of hacks.

But Celebrities are doing it...

...Therefore, it must be a safe and smart thing to do. My Manager suggested I create a MySpace account to market myself to a broader audience. Buzz!!! Wrong answer, idiot!

user-submitted HTML content bad

Well of course they are. Any site that allows random users to post HTML content that then gets embedded in the site's pages (especially as extensively as sites like Myspace, etc allow it) is going to be subject to security flaws. Moral of the story: browse such sites using a secure browser, at least as secure a browser as you can find.

That's not nice to the girls.

Seriously I know they aren't exactly the most prudish, but calling them holes is just crude.

Oh we're talking about security? My bad.

Try Deleting Your Facebook Account

I recall reading a story recently regarding this issue. From a girl's facebook account, researchers had enough information to steal her identity in 15 minutes. On a side note: I am not able to delete my facebook account. To fully delete it, I have to remove everything from my wall and every friend, I've ever had. Don't really want to do that. I can "disable" it. Personally, i would just like to be removed from their database. No seriously - i sent them the SQL statement that would probably take care of it. I fully detest facebook.

Stop the presses!

A site where you put in your name, age, and location, for the soul purpose of meeting people is unsecured?

What sort of fiend would pray on people who clearly state there name, address, age, and often occupation, hangouts, favorite things.

I mean really, how much security did you expect. There is no anonymity on Myspace or Flicker, so who the hell would be surprised when it gets hacked. There are probably a million people out there that hate Myspace (or flicker/other social sites) some of them must have the desire to program with malicious intent. It's a big fat whale carcase just waiting for the sharks to arrive.

MySpace is the boogeyman

I work at a computer repair shop, and every single day I hear some variation of "as soon as you log in to MySpace you open a port in your firewall and that's why you have a virus." I've been asked before to block MySpace on customers' systems. My boss has complained that the store's computer has errors because someone logged on to MySpace (it has nothing to do with the 500+GB of customer backups on the system, because they're not on the same hard drive as Windows).

And now you go and post this? Despite the headline having no real basis in the article, and that the context implies that this exploit is not in the wild yet, it's going to be used to justify every past and future accusation.

If I'm lucky, my employers will only knee-jerk at the headline. If not, they'll read the entire article, knee-jerk at the headline anyway, and based on the statement, "it only affects older versions of the Firefox Web browser and does not affect Internet Explorer," argue that IE is superior in every way to Firefox. Just watch.

Thanks a lot, /.

Re:No!!!

THERE! That look realistically surprised to you guys?

Nah, you look more like you did in that faked YouTube video where you had a pineapple shoved up your butt.

At least I'm *assumuing* it was faked...