I know that this story line is getting old and that every single person that feels screwed by Facebook privacy has already moved on, but a story from today claims another Facebook bug could potentially be giving away your name and photos. This information could be used by hackers to get more information from you or to write a virus that could cause a lot of issues with your account and others.
According to stories posted today, if a person were to enter an email address and a WRONG password into Facebook login screen, a message shows that you must re-enter your password. The issue with this is that your profile picture AND full name are listed on this page as well. A spammer can write a program to enter and scrape full names and photos from this screen to use in some other malicious way.
A spokeswoman for Facebook said they are working fast to fix this bug and that it was just brought to their attention recently. There are “technical systems in place to prevent people’s names and photos from showing to unrelated users upon login” and the bug is to blame for the reason these systems are not working properly, says the spokeswoman via email.
The chief researcher at AVG says that most likely a hacker gang, like the one that wrote Koobface, will be trying to take full advantage of this information, but that maybe Facebook will beat them by getting the fix in place sooner.
Why take the risk of having your private Facebook nformation exposed at all ?
A new approach to protecting your Facebook privacy is by CLOAKing (encrypting) your posting. Best of all – it works independently of the Facebook privacy settings.
Just select the part of their posting that you want to keep private, pick a keyword and encrypt that part of your posting. You still post as you do today, and Facebook isn’t affected. Only people who you’ve shared your keyword with can read the CLOAKed parts of your postings.
CloakGuard offers a free Firefox plugin that you can use to encrypt your Facebook postings. They also offer a free online version that does the encryption without requiring any software to be installed.
Free Download — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/194385/
Free Online version — http://cloakguard.com/tryitfree.php
Demo — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSiKgesit4Q