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.
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