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W T Facebook?
Posted by: EgbertFly on Jul 29, 2010
How is it that the details of many millions of Facebook users was available on a BitTorrent site?
Well it is quite simple, the data was just out there waiting to be downloaded, along with lots of other content of dubious legality.
Apparently the information was found by a security research specialist. The total size of the data was about two point eight gigabytes.
The information was gathered by a script that was created to mine information from Facebook’s open access information.
So here is the scary part.
All the data that was gathered was freely available due to the fact that the data is open to search engines. It was gathered from users that have elected not to hide their profile from a search engine.
Information such as account names, profile links and contact details was listed in the data. Also included were names of friends, even though those friends had elected not to be listed in search engine results.
Whilst it might be scary in the way that the data was gathered, the legality of it is not in question. Public means just that. Once you have given permission to have your information made public, the information is out there to be gathered and manipulated as it is seen fit.
This in turn raises questions with regards to the openness of a site. Obviously the more open a site is, the faster friends can find one another, but in turn there is a price to be paid for that.
The world of the hacker is one of reaping the rewards of gathering information that is available in the many forms of availability. A simple search on a search engine for hacker tools reveals a scary amount of usable results
Hacking, ethical or otherwise, is a murky business.
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