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Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#61

Post by chalkandpaste »

tmh79 wrote: post #44
dawhizkid wrote: post #9

Is it wrong to be glad FB's reputation has tarnished (and stock price sideways) over the past year or so? For so long they've monopolized the talent pool in the Bay Area. If more people decide 1) they don't want to work at FB and 2) FB employees are itching to leave then I see any stain on FB's employment brand as a net positive to the greater tech + startup ecosystem.

they havent monopolized talent, they pay for talent. Facebook paying high salaries has increased all of our pay, equity etc, whether you work there or not. The only thing this may be bad for is founders who are in a zero sum competition with FB for talent and now need to spend more money and equity to get it.

This is a very short-sighted view. Yes it has some immediate benefit in terms of pay, but you have to consider the long-term societal tradeoff of not developing addictive mental candy for people or developing societally useful technologies (or vice-versa, as it now stands). We can focussed on getting paid a lot now, or improving the wealth of everyone and generative the value we can all enjoy later.

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#62

Post by dlubarov »

IvyMike wrote: post #45

So here is a question: my girlfriend only uses FB on her laptop, and always logs out when she's done. I usually make fun of her for doing this. But does this mean most of the time that there was no active access token and she is mostly safe? (Excluding the windows of time where she was actively using FB) Do I have to take back all of my teasing?

Possibly -- if the attacker accessed session IDs, they could potentially hijack the sessions of logged-in users. If you log out, most servers will destroy the session data on their backend, so there's no session that can be hijacked.

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#63

Post by JumpCrisscross »

make3 wrote: post #52
ummonk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How have they monopolized the talent pool? By paying their employees better than everyone else?

there is also prestige associated to big names like Facebook (and Google, Apple, etc)

> there is also prestige associated to big names

I hate that this has happened. The Bay Area used to be a place where working for the big, shiny company that makes your parents happy wasn't prestigious. It was safe. But taking a risk and starting something new was admired. The present state of affairs reminds me of Wall Street.

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#64

Post by TallGuyShort »

make3 wrote: post #52
ummonk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How have they monopolized the talent pool? By paying their employees better than everyone else?

there is also prestige associated to big names like Facebook (and Google, Apple, etc)

I think that prestige only exists in the minds of some people who work there or have worked there. If I had a nickel for every time someone started a sentence with "well when I was at Google" for a scenario that is nothing like Google... Facebook's move-fast-and-break-things culture is fortunately a little less envied, in my experience.

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#65

Post by itsdrewmiller »

Fun quotes from all of two months ago:

'Facebook is clearly aware that losing its chief security officer and dissolving its dedicated security team, in the middle of all that’s going on, is not a great look. So many of the company’s statements today are clearly designed to address obvious concerns that arise.

“We expect to be judged on what we do to protect people’s security, not whether we have someone with a certain title,” a spokesperson said. In another statement, Facebook said it is “investing heavily in security to address new types of threats” and that its new security structure has “helped us do more to keep people safe.”'

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/1/17640852/facebook-cso-alex...

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#67

Post by laken »

testplzignore wrote: post #53

Fun fact: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/ was published at 16:42:44. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-... was published at 16:45:41. NYT writes fast :)

In the journalism world, pre-written articles are apparently quite common. I assume they had a boilerplate already for the next Facebook controversy, and just wrote 2-3 opening paragraphs that were relevant for this one.

CNN many years ago accidentally left some of their pre-written obituaries for (living) world figures publically accessible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_premature_obituaries#T...

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#68

Post by rajathagasthya »

throwawaymath wrote: post #31
rajathagasthya wrote: post #13

> This attack exploited the complex interaction of multiple issues in our code. It stemmed from a change we made to our video uploading feature in July 2017, which impacted “View As.” Obviously, Facebook is an extremely complicated system. But I find it hard to believe a video uploading feature would impact 'View As'.

It's very easy for me to believe. "View As" is an authorization and authentication sensitive, limited user impersonation feature. Video uploading interacts with, and complicates, authorization in an application with fine grained privacy and permission models. It's intuitively straightforward that modifying code for uploading videos could (read: not should) have authorization and authentication ramifications. One of t…

> It's intuitively straightforward that modifying code for uploading videos could (read: not should) have authorization and authentication ramifications.

I get this part. But why would it affect only videos and not other entities (photos, status etc.)? I would think creating (or uploading) any of the entities have the same authorization and authentication ramifications. What could be different for videos? Unless the privacy models are so fine grained that you can have different privacy settings for different entities (haven't used Facebook in years, so I don't really know). Your explanation makes sense, I'm just looking for a concrete example.

Re: Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

#70

Post by acdanger »

chalkandpaste wrote: post #61
tmh79 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they havent monopolized talent, they pay for talent. Facebook paying high salaries has increased all of our pay, equity etc, whether you work there or not. The only thing this may be bad for is founders who are in a zero sum competition with FB for talent and now need to spend more money and equity to get it.

This is a very short-sighted view. Yes it has some immediate benefit in terms of pay, but you have to consider the long-term societal tradeoff of not developing addictive mental candy for people or developing societally useful technologies (or vice-versa, as it now stands). We can focussed on getting paid a lot now, or improving the wealth of everyone and generative the value we can all enjoy later.

I agree with your premise, that many Facebook employeees would give society a better return on its investment if they were employed elsewhere, but that’s hardly Facebook’s fault.
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