Many Facebook users got the shock of their life when they found their account disabled apparently without any reason.
Frustrated, those users turned to Twitter to vent their annoyance. Interestingly the users whose accounts were disabled belong to the fairer sex only. Some men were also said to have complained about the incident, but on behalf of females they knew.
The reason for disabling the account was reportedly due to the suspicion that the owner of the account was using a fake name or wrongly claiming to be a female, and they were asked to upload a government-issued ID with their full name, date of birth, and clearly visible photograph for verification.
According to ReadWriteWeb, Facebook issued the following statement:
“Earlier today, we discovered a bug in a system designed to detect and disable likely fake accounts. The bug, which was live for a short period of time, caused a very small percentage of Facebook accounts to be mistakenly disabled. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately worked to resolve it. It’s now been fixed, and we’re in the process of reactivating and notifying the people who were affected.”
It is not know how many users were affected. Though not related, but this problem came just one day after Facebook released its new Message system.
AT&T announced that it had already fixed the problem that caused a mom and her two daughters to get into other people’s Facebook accounts using their mobile phones, earlier this month. The problem was, AT&T had a glitch in their infrastructure that connected the phones to the internet. This made it lose track of who owns which profile.
The mobile phone service provider said they added new security measures that will keep this incident from happening again. They also worked with Facebook to disable subscriber identification information that was used to automatically log-in. Now, to get into Facebook accounts, the site will only accept current cookies they placed or full login information.
Because this has already happened, there is a possibility that it can happen again. Fortunately, Chris Wysopal, co-founder of the security company, Veracode Inc., said, this problem will not happen to websites that use encryption because user’s browsers will have trouble decoding the encryption on the site that the user was not trying to get onto. Banking and e-commerce sites use encryption. Sadly, other sites do not. Web-based email and Facebook only use encryption when the user logs on but once within the site, the encryption is no longer used.
Bad things can happen on the internet whether it is because of the user’s carelessness or not. We cannot just depend on the security of sites. It is also important that we do our part and not upload sensitive information online if it can be helped.
