2600

Gregory writes in to point out that Facebook does a lousy job of monitoring the development of its third-party Platform applications—and in fact many of them are written so badly that they can be easily hacked. The examples he cites, which are listed in the winter issue of the hacker magazine 2600, are all fairly mild stunts like spoofing user IDs, changing the moods of another user, and re-routing gifts, “but this information could be used to mount large scale social engineering attacks if automated and coupled with other information.” To illustrate how easy it is to change another user’s settings, he pointed us to a YouTube example of how to change another users “mood” via the Mood app.