Okay Geek Farm
Firesheep allows you to hack into Facebook, Twitter accounts using Firefox
Brandon Davenport
There has been a failure on the internets, and you need to start barracking your Facebook and Twitter accounts because a double-click is all it takes. There are many un-secured HTTP sebsites that don’t effectively hide your info, and that list includes Facebook, Twitter and many of the web’s most popular destinations.
A new app called Firesheep developed by Eric Butler has turned everything we know about privacy online, upside down and inside out — it’s essentially a handy Firefox extension that will let you snoop on any open wi-fi networks, and capture anyone’s cookies. “As soon as anyone on the network visits an insecure website known to Firesheep, their name and photo will be displayed” , says Butler.
The disturbing part is, after you find someone you want to take advantege of, you simply double-click on their name, and you are immediately logged into their account — no usernames or passwords needed. This just raises one question — how is Facebook and Twitter going to fix this?
In just two easy steps…
“Firesheep is built to identify cookies from Amazon.com, Basecamp, bit.ly, Cisco, CNET, Dropbox, Enom, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Github, Google, HackerNews, Harvest, Windows Live, NY Times, Pivotal Tracker, Slicehost, tumblr, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo, Yelp” — Evelyn Rusli, TechCrunch
Obviously, this is not a good thing, and is defiantly going to be a blast for click happy “hackers” — so for now, we recommend a few things, and we don’t take this lightly — this is threat level midnight people:
T3ch H3lp Disaster plan
- Change your passwords, and logout of everything
- Do not use open WiFi to login to Facebook, Twitter or anything else
- Use only a hard-wired connection until this subsides
- Do not check the “remember my password” box
- Optional: Hide yo kids, hide yo wife (and hide yo husband) cuz they rapin erbody out here!
