In a serious security breach reported by the Associated Press, three Georgia women — a mother and her two daughters — using cell phones to access their Facebook accounts, found themselves glaring at the private information of complete strangers.
An apparent routing goof by the family’s wireless provider, AT&T, brought the problem to light.
The women were directed to a Web page for which they had not entered a user name or password.
It has not been determined exactly what caused the breakdown, but AT&T spokesman Michael Coe theorized that a “misdirected cookie” might have caused it.
A cookie is a file some Web sites place on users’ computers to store personal information — like the user name that Facebook members enter to access their pages. Coe told the AP that technicians couldn’t figure out how the cookie had been routed to the wrong phone, leading it into the wrong Facebook account.
–michele fling
