new security hole in facebook

I was logged into facebook and just saw the craziest thing; you can have your apps activated and doing things while you aren't signed into facebook.

I am sure you must be thinking, that doesn't make any sense.

Let me describe my steps below:

I was logged into two sessions of facebook (two windows open) and they were both on my home page.

I was using firefox and on one of the sessions went into the mafia wars game application; I then clicked on the second session and signed out of facebook. One would think that by signing out of this session, it would have deactivated my other session as well; it did this to a certain extent. I carried out a few actions in my game, ie. deposited some money etc and was able to do this successfully. I then clicked on the home link and it asked me to sign into facebook.

When I saw this, I re-signed into facebook and re-entered my application and checked to make sure the applications I had carried out in my game had been successful; they had, I was able to recreate this scenario without any problems.

This is significant, if I can do this in mafiawars, can you picture the implications with other applications? What if other applications go further and connect to things like your location, or private pictures? What if you were logged into facebook, on a public computer like in the library?

Something to think about...

Some thoughts on malware analysis and vmware

There are a number of different ways to examine malware, from using automated sites like threatexpert and virustotal to running your own sandbox locally (either on a physical machine or by using virtualization software like vmware). There are some in the malware analysis community who advocate using real hardware, as some pieces of malware have virtualization detection mechanisms built into them. Others point out that virtualization provides a greater level of flexibility and you can actually put measures in place for dealing with malware that tries to behave differently in a virtualized environment. I recently began to think a lot about this, since many companies are now using virtualization to a greater extent internally on things like webservers, as this can lead to lower costs and flexibility. It makes one wonder, does this mean that we are going to see a new trend in malware that ignores whether a machine is virtualized or not and just behaves the same anyway? If this does not appear to be the case, then does it mean that increased virtualization of both servers and desktops can actually reduce the likelihood of an organization being as heavily impacted by malware?

Interesting information leak from facebook

The other day I signed into facebook and came across something very interesting. I noticed an update on my newsfeed from someone I had sent a friend request to. Having seen this I was under the impression that they had accepted my friend request, consequently I clicked on their profile and saw that it said awaiting friend confirmation. This is significant and may have some forensic/ investigative value because it seems to tell us that depending on what privacy settings a person has, if they don't act on a friend request, you can still get regular updates on some of their information on your newsfeed. This could potentially be used to track when a person changes, or updates their pictures, posts status updates or other information, without actually having to go to their profile page on a regular basis and without being part of their friendship group on facebook.