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Facebook Security IT

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Page Hacked 158

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-you-can dept.
dinscott writes "An unknown hacker broke into the 26-year-old internet celebrity's Facebook account and posted a bizarre message calling upon the firm to adopt a social cause. More than 1800 people 'liked' the update before Facebook took down their CEO's page. Facebook has made no public statement about how the hack occurred, possibly to save their CEO from embarrassment."
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Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Page Hacked More

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Page Hacked

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  • In other news... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Magada ( 741361 )

    The new /. still sucks. Yeah, mod me offtopic. I'll take the karma hit for a good cause.

    • Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:31AM (#35008334)

      Hey, I got here from Googling my idol and my favorite site, Facebook.

      This is sooo great here, ya know! It looks so kewl here! Can I make you my friend? I could use some of these karma hits you talk about myself. My life has been pretty sucky ....

      Hey, this Slash Dot site is pretty good? Where's the Sash dot button on Facebook? .... My buddy theodore saw my face on Starbaucks ad! Isn't that kewl! This is rock'in! I think I'll put this page on my wall.

      --Biffy

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by derGoldstein ( 1494129 )
      I'm waiting for the "What do you think of the redesign?" poll. There are multiple scenarios in which /. simply became unusable.
      Oh, and by all means mod me down too. If nobody criticizes, nothing will change.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Rather than vague complaints in comments of unrelated articles have you tried providing feedback to Slashdot? I see a lot of people complaining and thinking that because something is broken for them it is broken for everyone. I fail to see how your criticism would lead to change as you sight nothing specific. BTW this isn't just directed at you, but as soon as I saw the redesign my first thought was great, now all of the comments will be complaints about the redesign (before I formed my own opinion I dre

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by JackieBrown ( 987087 )

      It is offtopic and should be modded that way.

      Here is the actual article discussion if you want to bitch on-topic.

      http://meta.slashdot.org/story/11/01/25/163257/Slashdot-Launches-Re-Design [slashdot.org]

      • Re:In other news... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Magada ( 741361 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @12:06PM (#35010168) Journal

        Think of it as burning karma for great justice. I'm sick of complaint departments that collect complaints and dump them and support e-mail addresses that don't support anything and free speech zones that aren't and generally of all the bullshit of manufacturing consent. I intend to be obnoxious in return.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fishexe ( 168879 )

          Think of it as burning karma for great justice.

          The only things you're allowed to do for great justice are move 'ZIG' and take off every 'ZIG'. Even setting up someone the bomb is done in opposition to great justice, not for it.

  • Security (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HaZardman27 ( 1521119 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:19AM (#35008154)
    Maybe he'll start taking privacy and security seriously now, but probably not.

    • Re:Security (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:28AM (#35008284)

      Perhaps, but probably only his privacy and security. He can't give up the advertising revenue; it's FB's lifeblood.

      • All they need to do is create "citizen council groups" organized by zip code or something, put everyone inside one, set some default topics such as health and education or public representative responsiveness, and they're done.

      • The company I work at offers software as a service, we provide a email marketing add on ... think company wide letterhead for your email messages from individual users in a company to individual users elsewhere, not bulk/spam mail.

        Of course we use the service our selves, duh, and as a developer worried about this exact sort of problem I can tell you that ... no one can change high profile users within our organization without direct access to the database server hosts themselves. Their information is more

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          Is it a dirty hack? Yes, but it'll save face in most cases ... not all of course.

          If an application server is compromised, or a hole is found in the application, it is possible that the attacker will change the code or produce an SQL injection that will change database server contents, without having direct access to the database server.

          If you were really paranoid.... instead of "hard coding"; you would have a special corporate procedure for changing important pages, such as PGP signing of the

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What does this have to do with privacy? Are you suggesting that if someone is able to successfully login into your Facebook page, including you, they should be unable to see any personal information? Might as well close down the site.

  • if zuckerberg went away for a while (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    and built up a few different anonymous networks of relationships incognito in Europe and Asia,

    and came back, and realized "Shit. This network of Friends is totally useless for adding my new friends and lovers."

    Then he would finally fix Facebook and make it appropriate for me to use. Until then, like all serious billionaires, celebrities, politicians, and just Renaissance men -- I'm holding out. Good luck, Mark.

    • That is the issue. It puts people who shouldn't know each other into one giant cesspool. Not all my friends are friends with each other.

  • I'm still pissed ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by KillaBeave ( 1037250 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:22AM (#35008202)
    ... that he shot Bill Murray.
  • ..not to let his computer unlocked at the office when he goes to have a piss!

  • His Fan Page, Not His Account (Score:5, Informative)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohnNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:23AM (#35008214) Journal

    An unknown hacker broke into the 26-year-old internet celebrity's Facebook account

    I don't think that's an accurate account of what happened. It was his Fan Page [washingtonpost.com], not his personal page. That may or may not have been updated by him -- most likely it was some staff or fan of Zuckerberg.

  • does he create a list and delete your account?
    • One of my friends quoted the headline on his wall and it was removed by Facebook. So that's probably not far off...
      • i fought the trend.. i didnt have a fb account until 2007. it eventually roped me in. Now I'm suceptible to the whims of that wealthy bahstahd. he hasnt bought out slashdot yet has he? (since im calling him a bahstahd)

        • It's a good way to stay in touch with old WoW friends who don't play anymore.

          Just like World Of Warcraft; everything in moderation.

  • New job opening (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kildjean ( 871084 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:27AM (#35008274) Homepage

    Will be available soon because someone will get fired today... I can tell you that...

    • Re:New job opening (Score:4)

      by corbettw ( 214229 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @10:17AM (#35008880) Journal

      Yes, that's the proper course of action to take when something goes wrong: immediately affix blame and fire the person who made a mistake. Let's not take the time to learn from our mistakes and ensure we don't repeat them, just get rid of anyone who is at all imperfect.

      This is why you are (probably) not in management and never will be. If you are in management, this is why your employees hate you.

      • Yes, that's the proper course of action to take when something goes wrong: immediately affix blame and fire the person who made a mistake. Let's not take the time to learn from our mistakes and ensure we don't repeat them, just get rid of anyone who is at all imperfect.

        This is why you are (probably) not in management and never will be. If you are in management, this is why your employees hate you.

        Meanwhile, here in reality... How likely you are to get fired is directly proportional to how public your mistake is or was.

        For example, if you make a public mistake on a website everyone's heard of odds are your head will be on the chopping block because investors need to see problems are dealt with swiftly and efficiently. If you just spill coffee on your company-issued laptop you're probably just going to get reprimanded and not allowed to have another one but you keep your job because you only made you

        • Depends on the company. At a company I was doing contract work for, one of their engineers made a dumb mistake, by not paying enough attention to detail, (only a modest amount was needed anyway), and it ended up costing the company $500K. He wasn't fired, but his department and others had to come up with ways to keep it from happening again.

          Knowing that the chances of you getting fired are pretty low for making even a stupid mistake helps people to acknowledge and own up to the mistakes faster and with
          • "it ended up costing the company $500K. He wasn't fired, but his department and others had to come up with ways to keep it from happening again."

            Yes, it's kinda silly to fire someone when you just spent $500K training them.
      • That was the joke. You know, that it isn't the proper course of action.

        But hey, wrongly assume you know what someone is talking about then start talking down to them and tell them they'll never be a success? Yep! Can definitely tell you're in management. Keep up the good work, somebody has to prove the stereotypes!

      • I haven't seen any evidence that having a fire-someone-immediately mentality keeps anyone out of management. Except of course the people who are on the receiving end of it. I've seen it (including up close and personal) more times than I want to think about.

      • You must be new in Slashdot. Being sarcastic is part of the culture here.
        You are right somewhat, I don't manage people, I manage servers... Thousands of them.
        People whine bitch and moan... Computers don't, most of them anyways...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lennier ( 44736 )

          People whine bitch and moan... Computers don't, most of them anyways...

          I take it you've never tried to compile a Linux system from source and looked at the gcc warning logs?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        Don't mistake observation for advocacy. You are perfectly correct that firing someone usually isn't a decent or useful response to this sort of thing. He is perfectly correct that all too often management scapegoats someone so they can sweep the problem under the rug or at least deflect attention from their own shortcomings (that actually lead to the problem) because they know that THEIR manager will take the same approach.

        It's truly pervasive. Honestly, our entire society could be summed up by 2 phrases: "

    • Re:New job opening (Score:4, Funny)

      by locallyunscene ( 1000523 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @11:11AM (#35009540)
      I don't think they can fire Mark Zuckerberg.
    • And the hacker will be hired.

  • Maybe god wasn't a good choice of passwords for the superuser account? He should have read the memo.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Spectre ( 1685 )

      Maybe god wasn't a good choice of passwords for the superuser account? He should have read the memo.

      S'okay, the new password will be selected from the following list:
      love
      sex
      secret
      (since, "god" has already been used it has been locked out).

  • The next thing that needs to be hacked and improved is /.

    I can't even imagine what can be done to the site at this point to make it any more ugly and less user friendly.

    You can't invent anything better than BBS for this type of a system anyway.

  • Roy Castillo (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A few hours ago, many people were tweeting of a Facebook status update from someone called Roy Castillo appearing on their Facebook Wall. Could this be related?
  • ..no matter how much security you try to put around something, someone else can always get around it. That's the nature of the game and I hope it never changes.

  • Please god where is the like buton for this.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @10:03AM (#35008694) Homepage

    Kudos to the person that "hacked" it. what a better way to highlight the security problems with facebook than to target the head cheese.

  • I get spammed by those "Causes" people all the time!

  • I love consultants (Score:3, Funny)

    by snookiex ( 1814614 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @10:11AM (#35008796) Homepage
    From TFA:

    Facebook users - famous or not - need to take better care of their social networking security," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

    Scott Adams has depicted them in so many ways [dilbert.com]...

  • How are we sure Slashdot hasn't been hacked.

    Go ahead and mod this down, karma be damned... this is disconcerting.

  • One known vulnerability (Score:5, Informative)

    by OverkillTASF ( 670675 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @10:20AM (#35008910)
    One of my associates manages the Facebook page of a local baseball team. A while back, they started getting iPhone spam posted to their team's Facebook page. No one could tell why. He was changing passwords, taking away peoples' access, running offline virus scans on their hard drives... Losing his mind with it. Each time one of these messages got posted, they'd lose 1,000 fans due to the spam. That's a big deal for companies that use Facebook. Turns out, the issue was due to the "mobile updates" feature. According to him, there's a random email address that you send updates to, and that gets posted to your page. This is not something you can disable, you can only request that the address be changed. The result is that you can basically spam a whole ton of random email addresses in this format and get your message posted to a load of random Facebook pages. Facebook has not been helpful in stopping this or disabling this feature for their account. Since then, I have seen this happen to my girlfriend's Facebook page as well as her friends', etc. This vulnerability is a wide spread problem. It may not be what happened in TFA (I did not read it), but it's out there. And it's insane.

  • Hackercup 2011 (Score:3)

    by Stregano ( 1285764 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @11:28AM (#35009714)
    Why would Facebook host something called Hackercup 2011 and NOT expect something like this to happen during it? It would be like me going to Def Con with a Windows XP machine, use they open wireless network, and get pissed and think it is weird that my computer got hacked. Seriously. Also, I checked the "Hackercup 2011" stuff they are doing, and it should be called just another programming competition. You put the word hacker in there, and something is getting hacked, for real. Maybe ol' zucky-poo should have thought that one out better. They should let the unknown hacker win the Hacker cup since he did a hack cool enough to not just make headlines, but some people that posted the headline to their status got it removed by FB. I would say that the person won regardless of what the even was (the hacker clearly marked at the end that this had to do with the Hackercup)
    • I take it that they're referring to "hacker" as in Y Combinator's "Hacker News", as in "programmer in general", rather than the more classic meanings of "one who accesses systems without authorisation by means of exploiting vulnerable code, etc" or "skilled programmer with tendencies to the questionably legal".
  • It's clear that none of Facebook's code was compromised, otherwise other high-profile pages would be being defaced. What's more likely here is that, through some human flaw of easy security questions or simple passwords (I can't see the Zuck or his immediate staff using unsecured wifi), the account was compromised. Ergo, not a hack. That pedantry aside, I'm very much pleased to see Facebook knocked down a peg or two, especially in the area of security.

  • Its all good, as long as the message was positive, and made sense in the long run, should be ok, although it should also go to show that too easy to hack a facebook account and hack their info...I wonder if the perp, knows Zuck's private schedule now....unless Zuck himself knows not post all his coming and goings on facebook.

  • Ha Ha. How appropriate

  • iloveericaalbright

    You don't get to 200 million dollars [boxofficemojo.com] without exposing a few clues.

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