A hacking group calling themselves “Team Swastika” have published what they claim to be the usernames and passwords for over ten thousand Facebook accounts on Pastebin, an online service for sharing large quantities of text data online. It should be noted that the PR agency for Facebook in the UK gave me the following statement, “This does not represent a hack of Facebook or anyone’s Facebook profiles. Our security experts have reviewed this data and found it to be a set of e-mail and password combinations that are not associated with any live Facebook accounts“.
Team Swastika are a new arrival on the hacking scene, having announced their “launch” only six days ago. although they have only one tweet to their name they have already caused concern by publishing database tables and user credentials stolen from the websites of the Indian Embassy in Nepal and the Government of Bhutan, apparently by SQL injection attack.
This latest publication of what they claim to be more than ten thousand Facebook user credentials is without context and with no indication of the means by which they were stolen. The posts themselves have already been removed by Pastebin but I managed to get a look at them before this happened
There’s a hot new Web site making the rounds that mines your Facebook account and inserts your photo and other information into a creepy video — playing right into our biggest fears about privacy and the information we share online.
The mysterious site is called Take This Lollipop. After you give the site permission to connect to your Facebook account, it begins playing a video featuring a sweaty, twitchy man, sitting in a darkened room, using a computer to nose around Facebook. But he’s not browsing through just any random page — he’s looking at your account and getting increasingly agitated by what he’s seeing.
The site is generating chatter on sites like Hacker News. It’s similar to the video engine created for the 2004 election by MoveOn, an advocacy group, that let people to customize a faux-news report poking fun at their friends who did not want to vote.
Jason Zada, a television and music director who works in Los Angeles and San Francisco, announced Tuesday on Twitter that he was behind the site.
Mr. Zada, whose resume includes interactive campaigns like the “Elf Yourself” videos for Office Max and commercials for Ray-Ban and Coupons.com, said in an interview that the site was a fun side project for him. He collaborated with a cinematographer, an actor and a developer to polish the final product. He insisted that it was not a stealthy attempt to garner attention for a brand or product.
“People keep asking me what sinister plan we’re working on behind it,” he said. “I just love Halloween, and got the idea about a month ago and decided to shoot it.”
In the first 24 hours of the site being open to the public, more than 300,000 people have given it access to their Facebook accounts, Mr. Zada said. He thinks that it is attracting attention because of its novelty, but also because it taps into broader concerns that people have about how their personal information could be misused.
“When you see your personal information in an environment where you normally wouldn’t, it creates a strong emotional response,” he said. “It’s tied into the fears about privacy and personal info that we have now that we live online.”
But he promises that the site is intended purely for entertainment, and a fun, seasonal thrill.
“We’re not doing anything crazy with the info,” he said. “It just makes you feel that way.”
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