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More than 1MM Facebook accounts exposed

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Re: More than 1MM Facebook accounts exposed

#53
post #24

Here's one theory and analysis of what might have happened. Some people's emails got out into the public internet, and were indexed. Some of these emails were from Facebook, and included links to resources that require login. These links pre-populated the username field for convenience, or in some cases auto-login the user. Facebook's engineers probably did not anticipate email notifications to users being crawled by…

This is how everything started:

A friend forward me an email from a FB group notification

Something like:

http://www.facebook.com/n/?groups%[id here]%2Fpermalink%[id here]%2F&mid=[id here]&bcode=[id here]-mjoi&n_m=[email adress here]

When I clicked the url I got automatically logged into my friend's account.

So is definitely a Facebook security issue.

Then I tried some google searches to see if I could find some urls containing the parameters:

bcode= &email= n_m= mid=

Not a big deal, really.

Re: More than 1MM Facebook accounts exposed

#54
post #30

You think this is bad. Try doing the following google search: "password" filetype:csv

I'm sure lots of people have had unwanted encounters with Google's crawlers, but here's mine: I used to have a subdomain pointing to my home IP which was protected using Apache htpasswd. I naively had all of my clients' credentials stored in text files (conveniently named credentials.txt). Somehow I accidentally removed the htpasswd authentication and it was publicly exposed for a day or two. Of course Google indexed it and you could view everything in Google's cache.

There was a process for removing content from Google, but it took a few months to get completed. I never told anyone and I'm pretty sure all that info is now purged (I've tried to find it multiple times and it doesn't seem to exist anywhere).

I also downloaded a WoW guide that I had temporarily thrown up on one of my servers and forgot to take down. Like a year later I randomly was running a Google image search for 'Northrend Map' and happened to notice my site was the THIRD image. At first I thought it was a personalized search result, but I checked from multiple other places and it was still there even though there were zero inbound links.

Re: More than 1MM Facebook accounts exposed

#55
Common misinterpretation on how Google handle `Disallow` in robots.txt

Q. If I block Google from crawling a page using a robots.txt disallow directive, will it disappear from search results? [1]

robots.txt Disallow does not guarantee that a page will not appear in results: Google may still decide, based on external information such as incoming links, that it is relevant. If you wish to explicitly block a page from being indexed, you should instead use the noindex robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. In this case, you should not disallow the page in robots.txt, because the page must be crawled in order for the tag to be seen and obeyed.

[1] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index...

Re: More than 1MM Facebook accounts exposed

#57
post #26

Facebook's privacy settings have a ton of bugs. Here's another one: 1. Make a stupid status update post. 2. It appears in all your friends newsfeed. 3. You realize you said something stupid and private. 4. Panic. Delete post 5. Breathe sigh of relief that it is no longer showing up in your profile. 6. But wait a minute! It still keeps showing up in all your friends newsfeed. 7. Now that you deleted the post, you can'…

to be fair, cache invalidation is hard.

All they need to do is add a new "message" to say "y'know that message number 4029375 in the cache, yeah that ones deleted, ignore it".

This is not hard.

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