According to a late breaking story on TechCrunch a hole appeared in the wall that surrounds Facebook long enough to have the code for the main Facebook index page to have been leaked.
From what Nik on TechCrunch says the code has been published to a blog called Facebook Secrets of which the leaked code is the only entry; which is taken to mean that this blog was created specifically for this purpose and who ever is behind the leak and/or posting doesn’t want to be connected publicly to it.
While the article over at TechCrunch goes into a number of the ramifications of this leak the big one for me is if this can happen; and given that Facebook is becoming a larger target everyday just how safe is all that data you are feeding to it.
UPDATE: In the spirit of journalistic integrity it should be noted that very quickly after the post appeared on TechCrunch the Facebook patrol was out with the firehoses with Brandee Barker telling the TechCrunch readership that it was due to a misconfiguration of a single server that was quickly fixed.
However I liked Tony Hung’s response to a commenter on Deep Jive Interests who thought an update to Tony’s original post was required.
Could a server misconfiguration send out the whole source code in its entirety when you put in the Facebook URL?
Conversation Tags: Facebook, source code leak, security, TechCrunch, Nik Cubrilovic
11 Comments
It was a temporary server misconfiguration, not a security breach, and didn’t compromise any user data.
He was at DJI like 5 minutes ago.
I was impressed
.. BTW DJI is still not playing nice when I try to leave comments not sure why but keeps shuffling me off to the “need to approve” pile 
don’t think it’s a hoax … there will probably be a lot of FUD coming out of Facebook tomorrow and the following week but there are some interesting times for it ahead … read Tony’s piece over at DJI to give you an idea - http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2007/08/12/facebook-hacked-by-an-inside-job/
the actual post was about a week ago IIRC but being an old cranky fart I could be off by a day or two
I can always let you know if it happens again and when.
I haven’t seen any claim that the “entire Facebook source” was released. For one thing, the bug could only display the highest (presentational) tier of the codebase, which is the least important. For another, I’ve only heard reports of 3-4 source files being made public.
I realize you were the original commenter that Tony was replying to but thanks for clarifiing.
However I wasn’t trying to suggest anything against your posts either on DJI or here .. I just thought that Tony’s follow-up comment was a good one - that is all .. nothing more nothing less
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