AT&T Flaw Provided Access to Other People's Facebook Accounts [REPORT]

A Georgia family found they were logged into other people's Facebook accounts on their phones last weekend due to a flaw in AT&T's data routing. The error, seemingly caused by AT&T sending the wrong data to customers, hasn't been widely reported before.

According to an Associated Press report, Fran Sawyer and her two daughters visited Facebook on their AT&T phones and found themselves logged into accounts they didn't recognize. The three sent a message from one of the unknown accounts to their own Facebook accounts to prove there was an issue.

The report also cites a second incident in November, when a 25-year-old man celebrating Thanksgiving in Vancouver, Washington, found himself logged into a young woman's Facebook account -- both were using AT&T phones to access the site. When he e-mailed the woman in question, she replied that she had mysteriously been logged into the man's account, too.

The AP writes:

"Generally Web sites and computers are compromised from within... But in this case, it was a security gap between the phone and the Web site that exposed strangers' Facebook pages to the Sawyers. Misconfigured equipment, poorly written network software or other technical errors could have caused AT&T to fumble the information flowing from the Sawyers' phones to Facebook and back.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said its wireless customers have landed in the wrong Facebook pages in 'a limited number of instances' and that a network problem behind those episodes is being fixed."