Didja know? nakedsecurity.sophos/2013/07/19/facebook-the-early-years-handing-out-a-master-password-like-candy/ ~XPosing Fakebook = Fedbook~ by Lisa Vaas on July 19, 2013 You are not paranoid about surveillance - at least, not as far as Facebook is concerned. It appears that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his minions, in the early days, had a master password with which they could sign in to any user account and poke at whatever data we entrusted to the site. The Guardian gleaned this from Zuckerbergs former speechwriter, Katherine Losse. Losse told the media outlet that users should be guarded with their private data on the site - a timely warning, given the launch of Facebooks social search tool graph search. Losse - aka Facebook employee No. 51 - joined the company in 2005 as a customer support staffer and worked her way up to being Zuckerbergs ghostwriter. She left in 2010 and, according to the Guardian, is now regarded as a rogue former employee by Facebook itself. In 2012, she released a book, The Boy Kings, about those early years. Recent revelations about the US National Security Agencys (NSAs) voraciously hungry appetite for surveillance may have left many users of social networking sites fretting about the government sucking up our private data, but Facebook has been privy to that data - including our passwords - from its infancy, Losse told the Guardian. As The Guardians Siraj Datoo points out, thats a little scary, given that plenty of users likely have never changed their passwords since they first signed up. To make matters worse, many people commit security blasphemy by using the same password on multiple sites. To make matters spontaneously combust in worse-osity, Losse wrote in The Boy Kings that in its early years, Facebook passed out the master password like candy, without vetting any of the support staffers.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 04:50:45 +0000
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