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.
