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AT&T glitch opens can of security worms

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Just when you thought you’d seen everything when it comes to security issues with Facebook, AT&T comes along and makes it worse.

In a story from Associated Press:

A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers’ accounts with full access to troves of private information.

oopsIt turns out there was a network routing error from AT&T’s network that caused the problem, thinking one user was another; thereby giving free access to all that account information.  While Facebook does have new privacy measures to stop such things, what happens when its your cellular phone providers fault?

This doesnt bode well for AT&T, especially with their new voice plan pricing rolling out on Monday.  How many people are going to want AT&T’s voice and data plan when their security could potentially be compromised?

AT&T’s response:

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said its wireless customers have landed in the wrong Facebook pages in “a limited number of instances” and that a network problem behind those episodes is being fixed.

So, all you AT&T users, next time you want to log onto Facebook, make sure its your account.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. GoodThings2Life

    01/16/2010 at 9:27 pm

    AT&T really needs to fire their network engineers. All of them. The network is constantly in one of two conditions– pathetic or down.

  2. Cintra

    01/16/2010 at 11:00 pm

    Beats me how a network problem can be the cause of a wrong Facebook login problem..?

  3. turn.self.off

    01/17/2010 at 1:29 am

    best guess, at&t is running some kind of giant NAT between their mobile network and the internet. So when said NAT fails, and ends up mapping one users traffic to another user, you get events like these.

    just another reason for the mobile operators to become dumb “pipes”, and for LTE and IPv6 to be rolled out globally.

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