UPDATED 12:42 EDT / JANUARY 17 2011

Facebook Privacy Issues Surface with Latest Hacker Attack

After seeing a whole lot of privacy issues this past year, Facebook, or at least its users, are in for another round. According to CNET, 23-year-old George Bronk from Sacramento, California utilized publicly-available information users uploaded onto Facebook to effectively get past their e-mail accounts’ security questions.

“According to the Associated Press, Bronk, from Sacramento, Calif., pleaded guilty to dozens of instances of hacking into women’s e-mail accounts, using personal information obtained on Facebook; then stealing nude photos of them (that had been e-mailed to, say, their husbands) and sending these photos to everyone in their contacts book.”

One victim reported Bronk suggested her that he found his activities to be “funny”. Eventually, investigators found 172 e-mail files obtained by Bronk which belonged to dozens of women from the U.S and England.

Security threats on social networks has been a big area of focus these past few weeks, especially as they move to the mobile sector, where security is a completely different ball game.  Developments around security include Firesheep, as well as Eric Butlers’ Mozilla add-ons’ affect on social network users including Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook had its fair share of security and privacy issues throughout the past year. That includes a recent and massive Facebook scam involving a warm which was downloaded around 28K times and of course the Facebook apps 3rd party data leakage scandal. Facebook hardened its defenses ever since that incident, but that doesn’t seem to be enough to keep hackers out of the loop.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU