Firesheep raises the alarm of cyber security on social networking!

Alright so it’s been a big problem now for really some time now, that we haven’t addressed a really grave issue, which has been showcased on a grand scale at the ToorCon Hacking Conference of San Diego by Ian Gallagher and Eric Butler, as they demonstrated their new product ‘Firesheep’. Ian is the member of Security Innovations based in Seattle and Eric is a freelance cyber security consultant. They have built this software ‘Firesheep’ which can extract passwords and user info from the local insecure Wi-Fi network. The software is said to exploit the lapsed HTTP session of all major social networks when they share the unsecure internet connection at Wi-Fi hotspots.

They have termed this problem as ‘an elephant in the room’, which indicates the problem has gone unattended and was a rhetorical impending catastrophe. Social networking sites use the HTTP sessions due to their faster rendering, but that compromises on the security of the user involved. While Firesheep has created much berserk and uproar, a reader of TechCrunch, Steve Manuel has come up with a quick fix solution which seems formidable. He recommends the use of Firefox’s Force-TLS plug-in which forces the sites to circumvent their sessions to HTTPS protocols.