The Associated Press have alerted us that a “Network flaw causes scary Web error”.
• In Georgia, Candace Sawyer, 26, used her Nokia smart phone to access Facebook.com. Without being asked for her user name or password, she was in…and in an account that wasn’t hers.
• She asked her sister and their mother, to see whether they had the same problem on their phones.
• They both ended up in other strangers’ accounts.
“I thought it was the phone — `Maybe this phone is just weird and does magical, horrible things and I have to get rid of it,’” said Candace Sawyer. The women had recently upgraded to the same model of phone and all used the same carrier, AT&T.
But it wasn’t just them.
• In Washington State, Stephen Simburg logged onto Facebook from his cell phone and ended up in a young woman’s page.
• He got her e-mail address from the site, logged off and wrote the woman a message, asking whether he had met her at some point and she had borrowed his phone to check her Facebook account.
• They figured out they hadn’t met, but were both using AT&T to access Facebook on their phones.
The glitch — the result of a routing problem at the wireless carrier, AT&T — revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.
The problem adds a dimension to researchers’ warnings that there are many ways online information — from mundane data to dark secrets — can go awry.
It’s not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. But experts said such flaws could occur on e-mail services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone, and with internet speed.
Tags: Facebook, Internet Speed