Hackers can delete Facebook friends, thanks to flaw
IDG News Service - A bug in Facebook's Web site lets hackers delete Facebook friends without permission.
The flaw was reported Wednesday by Steven Abbagnaro, a student at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. But as of Friday morning, Pacific time, it had still not been patched, based on tests conducted by the IDG News Service on a reporter's Facebook friends list.
A malicious hacker could combine an exploit for this bug with spam or even a self-copying worm code to wreak havoc on the social network, Abbagnaro said in an interview.
He's written proof-of-concept code that scrapes publicly available data from users' Facebook pages and then, one by one, deletes all of their friends. For the attack to work, however, the victim would first have to be tricked into clicking on a malicious link while logged into Facebook. "The next thing you know, you have no friends," Abbagnaro said.
The security researcher is not going to release the code used in his attack until after Facebook fixes the flaw, but he says that technically competent hackers could figure out how to pull off the attack.
That's because Abbagnaro's code exploits the same underlying flaw that was first reported by M.J. Keith, a senior security analyst with Alert Logic.
Last week, Keith discovered that Facebook's Web site was not properly checking code sent by users' browsers to ensure that they were authorized to make changes on the site.
Called a cross-site request forgery bug, the flaw is a common Web programming error, but Facebook has had a hard time eradicating it from the site. After Keith first reported the issue, Facebook thought it had fixed the problem, only to discover that it could still be exploited to make users "like" Facebook pages without their consent.
Similarly, Facebook appears to have missed Abbagnaro's delete-friend vector as well.
"I am just blown away that this keeps happening," Keith said in an e-mail interview.
Facebook representatives couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
Facebook's security team has been under siege lately, with worm attacks and site flaws popping up on a regular basis. These security issues come as the social network has been hit with intense criticism for not adequately protecting users' privacy, and inappropriately sharing user data with advertisers.
Users have been quitting the social network and a campaign proclaiming May 31 as Quit Facebook Day has gained some traction.
Despite all of its other problems, Facebook should have fixed this latest flaw by now, Abbagnaro said. "I'm not sure why they haven't fixed it yet because it is pretty serious."
Google Announces Android 2.2 with Flash
Google's made it official. They're releasing an Android 2.2 for phones with Flash support, web-synced apps and music, and faster performance, and a whole new product, Google TV, that aims to integrate web content, search, DVR, and regular old television. Gizmodo's covering the Google I/O conference live, and they've got up-to-the-minute screens and updates on what's being revealed about Google TV, Android 2.2, and even a screenshot tour of Android 2.2 in the wild. We'll dig into the new Android OS from a user's perspective, assuming it gets released, later today, but in the meantime, there are a few notable conveniences for users coming down the pike:
- peed: Google claims Android 2.2's browser is the fastest mobile browser around, due in large part to its new JavaScript compiling engine. They also cite frame rates in gaming and other speed improvements around the system.
- Over-the-air apps installing: The app syncing comes through an update of the Android Market's web page, which users can soon sign into, and the Market app on phones. You'll be able to click an app in the (searchable!) Market and push it to your phone, and have the web Market know what you've got installed on your phone.
- An "Update All" button: A small, but very time-saving, addition to the Market app.
- Music and photo syncing: Your music stashed in iTunes, iPhoto, Windows Media Player, and other locations can synchronize over the web soon, through Google's acquisition of SimplifyMedia (which caught almost everyone unaware).
- Flash 10.1 support: Expected, but now official. Interesting development for gaming and interactive apps—and a new platform for crash complaints.
- Built-in tethering and Wi-Fi sharing: Also expected, but very helpful. Remains to see which carriers will disable or push back on it.
Clean Up Your Messy Ubuntu Boot Menu
Linux only: If you're diligent about applying patches to your Ubuntu PC, you'll soon notice an annoying problem—the boot menu keeps growing bigger every time a kernel patch is installed. Here's how to clean it up. Over at the How-To Geek site (my home away from Lifehacker), writer Trevor covers the process of cleaning up the grub boot menu in the latest versions of Ubuntu. Before the days of grub2 in Ubuntu 9.10 and above, cleaning up your boot menu was easy, requiring nothing more than editing the menu.lst file, but the new boot manager doesn't work the same way.
To clean up old kernel entries from your own boot menu, just head into your package manager and remove the old kernel entries. Hit the link to learn about the full process, including how to manually remove any item, including the extra memtest86+ entry in the list.
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