Chattanooga- From www.timesfreepress.com- Representatives of Facebook say they have fixed a glitch that generated pornographic pictures across the Internet social network Tuesday night.
For 15 minutes, explicit photos were visible on the site’s “mini-feed,” a page designed to advertise online updates of a users’ friends. Photographs of naked women, some pregnant, were displayed under the names of multiple users who were unaware of their involvement in the publication of the material.
A Facebook official said the problem originated when a user of the application “iLike” generated an interactive quiz with explicit content that violated both iLike’s and Facebook’s policies. iLike serves as a Facebook application that allows its estimated 9 million users to personalize their music interests through shared playlists, games and discussions.
A flaw in Facebook software allowed the explicit quiz to spread more rapidly than usual across the network, officials said. Users received a notification that their friends had asked them to take the quiz. As soon as users clicked the link to do so, the explicit content was published and invitations to take the quiz automatically were sent to the friends’ Facebook pages.
“This was not a virus,” Simon Axten, a Facebook privacy and public policy associate, wrote in an e-mail to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. “We’ve since fixed the bug that was causing this in the first place.”
He added that iLike has taken action “to remove these quiz stories from the site.”
Mr. Axten said Facebook, which has more than 200 million users and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., learned of the violation at 9:29 p.m. EDT Tuesday.
“A patch to turn off the publishing of these stories was out within 15 minutes,” he said.
On the possibility of breaches such as this occurring in the future, Boggan Bates, a senior network engineer for Chattanooga-based Micro Solutions Inc., compared online security systems to home security systems.
“You can lock the doors, secure the windows and do everything right, but you still don’t know someone’s not going to get in,” he said. “Man made the system, so it only makes sense that a man could break the system.”