Facebook Bug Leaks Members' Birthday Data

By Robert McMillan
Wed, July 16, 2008

IDG News Service —

A glitch in a test version of Facebook's Web site inadvertently exposed the birthdays of Facebook's 80 million members this week.

The bug was discovered over the weekend by Sophos Senior Technology Consultant Graham Cluley. While checking out Facebook's new design, Cluley noticed that the birth dates of some of his privacy-obsessed acquaintances were popping up when they should have been hidden.

Facebook allows users to control who sees private information such as their birth date, which can be a valuable nugget of data for identity thieves. But Cluley discovered that the new site was making this information public to other members. "Their new profile page essentially ignored the privacy setting to withhold the data of birth," he said.

"For a brief period of time, a small number of users were able to access a private beta of Facebook's new site design meant only for developers. During that time, some of those users had their birthdays revealed due to a bug," Facebook said Wednesday in a statement. The company could not say exactly how long this data was exposed or how many people viewed the beta site, but the bug was patched within hours of Cluley's discovery.

Facebook may intend for the beta site to be private, but it has been open to the general public for several days. It features a new profile design that should be rolled out as an option to Facebook users some time this week.

Cluley himself did not consider this a major data breach, but he said it should serve as a warning to people who put a lot of information on social networks. "It raises a more serious question which is, 'Can you trust these social networks to look after your data properly?'" he said.

Facebook is sensitive about privacy. In November the company scrambled to fix its Beacon ad system after a CA researcher discovered that the system was collecting data on users' online behavior, despite Facebook's assurances to the contrary.

"With Beacon we just screwed it up," said Matt Cohler, the company's vice president of product management, during a March session with reporters.

Cluley isn't sure that won't happen again. He's telling his friends to just make up a birth date on Facebook from now on.

You are here: Technology Topics » News

Most Recent Technology Topics Stories

White Papers »

Has Your Server Infrastructure Kept Pace with End User Demands?

Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Data Loss Prevention Solution for Managing E-Discovery

The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.

Best Practices in Data Protection - Executive Summary

This research, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, focuses on issues relating to the use of data protection solutions such as endpoint encryption and data loss prevention within the workplace.

Business Centric DLP

This report, by Jon Oltsik from Enterprise Strategy Group, examines the need for a new business-centric approach to DLP in order to align business and security requirements.

Webcasts »

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Deliver Private Cloud Database as a Service with VMware vFabric Data Director

VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.

Reliable Disaster Protection with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.

Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often too expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications, largely because they are uncertain whether the quality of the protection is really worth its cost. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 is the market-leading disaster recovery product that addresses this situation for organizations of all kinds. It complements VMware vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter