Hackers Can Delete Facebook Friends, Thanks to Flaw

Original story without the splash page:

It also says that the flaw has been patched:

"*Update (5/22/10): After reporting the flaw to Facebook Wednesday afternoon, I have confirmed as of Friday afternoon that the flaw has been successfully patched. Facebook now strictly enforces the existence of the “post_form_id” CSRF protection token in the request."

If only deleting one's own account were this easy! I wonder how many people took useful advantage of this hole to commit mutual Facebook suicide.

it's a typical programmer mistake. So how do I avoid it ?

Put some middleware into your web framework that will insert a "secret" into all forms, which contains an unforgeable token generated by the page. Only accept form input when that secret token matches the expected value.

Django will do this for you; presumably other frameworks have similar mechanisms.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/csrf/

%s/hacker/cracker/g

Hackers can do it too.

Potato, potato.

By your logic, we might as well call it 'cracker news'.