Important Story If AT&T is Your Wireless Carrier

Associated Press released this story of several customers with AT&T wireless phones who were mis-directed due to an error to other people's Facebook pages including supposed protected information!
 
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20100116/D9D8JQC01.html

My Father got a $1700 bill from AT&T. The claim was that someone had his credit card  and cell phone account information and purchased four iphones in August...using a gift card as payment in Freehold NJ. The phones were never used and they tried to tell my Father that the investigated the matter...and determined it was not fraud. Hello.
 
But after a few days of listening to him go off...they told him that an unrelated case or cases of the exact same deal happened again  and they seem to be in the process of doing something to resolve the matter. I could not follow along at that point of the story because he was like a mile a minute.
Nothing to do with Facebook.

So then what was your point?

"a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users."

"Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this........"

These security experts must all be young people. I was involved in fixing these types of problems thirty years ago with predecessor technologies. We even had a name for it back then - 'tailgating'.

Besides alerting customers of AT&T Wireless about this present glitch, the story should make people aware that system glitches can allow you to get into someone else's password-protected account - facebook, bank account, email, etc. if the logical connections in the Internet get discombobulated. I even saw this happen back in the days of dial-up into modem pools connected to a time-sharing computer. Since those days, I always use the built-in "logout" function of a system, rather than simply disconnecting.

In the early days of the Internet, I did get into several other persons' accounts due to system glitches. My standard response was to log out the connection in software. I then reported the problem, both to my carrier and the site I was connected to.

There are still some people in AT&T (SBC & ATT) who are cocksure of themselves that they are always right, and blow off customers. As CCinNJ related, AT&T can't always solve the problem correctly the first time.