Facebook Suffers Porn Hack

For individuals that use Facebook on a consistent basis, recent images on friends Facebook walls probably caught you off guard. Several days ago, pornographic images and other disturbing content began to appear on individual’s pages, causing shock waves through the Facebook community. Facebook later admitted it did have issues with individuals hacking into the system and uploading the content.

Hacking is actually easier than most people believe with Facebook, as Facebook uses an XSS system. This means individuals are able to cross-site content from one website onto Facebook, which causes the images to appear (or anything else the individuals performing the cross site scripting are linking to the Facebook account).


If someone clicked on the image or link, that content began to appear on their own Facebook page, making it easy for the information to spread (it also makes it easy to see who clicked on the pornographic images). However, this upload was performed via a Javascript upload, and not directly through the website itself. All Internet browsers use Javascript, so Facebook was not able to initially remove the content, as it is actually connected to the browser as well. Facebook had to adjust some of its upload practices for coding in order to take off the content from its service.


Generally, when someone creates a widespread upload such as this, it is because there is a large payout in order to do so. This might come from hits the potential image generates, as many individuals are sent to a third party website that produces income for the hackers. It can also come from someone paying them to upload the content.


This may also arise from a competitor of Facebook, that is looking to generate poor press for the company, in hopes of collecting individuals leaving the website in search for a better, more family friendly atmosphere. Of course, these are just speculations. The individuals that took advantage of the error in the Javascript and Facebook coding might not of have any reason to perform the task at all, other than wanting to get people angry and upset with the images (which is exactly what it did).


The individual Internet browsers themselves need to create the fixes to the Javascript errors themselves, in order to prevent this from happening again on Facebook and other websites. So keep your eyes open for any new updates and downloads coming for your particular browser in the next few days, as there should be several updates made available.

Print This Page