• TechCrunch, Tuesday, July 6, 2010 12:38 PM

How secure is Facebook's administrative system? To find out, a senior engineer at the company responsible for "site reliability engineering," recently challenged his fellow Facebook employees to compromise him and, using information obtained from him, gain access to the social work's backend system. It took a couple weeks, but they succeeded by exploiting his home WiFi network.

TechCrunch suggests that Facebook was inspired by the "slap down" that the FTC gave Twitter in June because it "failed to prevent unauthorized administrative control of its system." While applauding the effort, however, TechCrunch asks: "If a security engineer at Facebook was compromised, even though he knew it was coming, imagine how trivial it would be for other people to get hit, too." The engineer in question, Pedram Keyani, argues that the experiment actually demonstrates how secure Facebook is, because, while the team could access his account, they were unable to compromise Facebook's administrative/corporate systems.

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