Panic at Facebook as Zuckerberg private photos are posted online
Private photos of Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg have been published online sending the social network "scrambling for a fix", according to the Wall Street Journal.
Mark Zuckerberg
In a post on the Web forum Bodybuilding.com ten days ago, an anonymous writer listed instructions on how to access photos uploaded by other Facebook members - even if the images were marked private.
On Tuesday a blogger reported on the security flaw, and used it to publish a photo from Zuckerberg's private collection. Others then used the flaw to publish further photos from the Zuckerberg collection. The Facebook CEO was pictured preparing food in a kitchen and distributing sweets to Halloween trick-or-treaters.
It wasn't immediately clear how long the Facebook security flaw was available on the Web, or how many of the site's more than 800 million users were affected, said the WSJ. Facebook attributed the problem to a recent revision of its software.
In a statement, a spokesman said the flaw "was the result of one of our recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed."
The anonymous poster said he discovered the flaw accidentally. "This is simply terrible programming on Facebook's part," said the poster, who gave his name only as John P., of Syracuse, New York.
He said he was "an IT professional" and the flaw was "Inexcusable considering how many engineers and web developers they have working for them."