China (Probably) Knows What You Did on Facebook Last Week

Published on 05 April 2011 by Stan Shyshkin in Safety & Security Tips, Security News

As if you didn’t already have enough reasons to secure your Facebook account to ensure that your privacy is protected, a new incident occurred last week that could have exposed all of your Facebook browsing data to the Chinese government. This wasn’t Facebook’s fault, however, but was instead caused by an error on AT&T’s network, and only affected a select group of Facebook users. China (Probably) Knows What You Did on Facebook Last Week

This security breach occurred early last week on AT&T’s network, which instead of sending user’s Facebook traffic to the proper servers, sent all of the data through China’s Internet provider, Chinanet. Fortunately, not all of AT&T’s Facebook users were affected. Those that had secure browsing enabled on their Facebook (https:) were able to avoid the Chinese government’s prying eyes, while everyone else’s information was completely open for anyone willing to look through it:

“This means that anything you looked at via Facebook without encryption was exposed to anyone operating Chinanet, which has a very suspect modus operandi,” Cybersecurity researcher Barrett Lyon writes.

“Does that include capturing your session ID information, personal information, emails, photos, chat conversations, mappings to your friends and family, etc? One could only speculate, however it’s possible,” says Lyon.

This case goes to show that even if you are extremely safe in your browsing and have the hardest password to crack, your data might still be accessed by others. For instructions on how to protect yourself with secure Facebook browsing, click here.

(Via Forbes) / (Image bybfishadow, licensed under Creative Commons)