The hacking of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's
charity foundation profile on
Facebook should serve as a serious warning, says security firm
Fortify Software.
The Facebook profile set up to promote Blair's Faith Foundation
was defaced by hackers last week who covered the site with personal
attacks on the former prime minister and his wife.
The fact that his page was hackable highlights the need to
include code auditing in the software development process, said
Richard Kirk, Fortify's European Director.
"That is something that whoever created the Facebook application
used by the Faith Foundation appears to have overlooked," he
said.
According to Kirk, the sheer volume of hacking activity on web
portals in general means that any company planning to show its web
pages to the public on the internet should audit the code of any
pages or applications used on the internet.
This especially applies to Web 2.0 services such as Facebook, he
said, where the extensible nature of the internet environment
allows users to program their own applets for use on the
service.
"Anyone coding software that includes any element of internet
interaction, and not just Web 2.0 environments, needs to be aware
of the risks," Kirk said.