Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has temporarily disabled its Midnight Messaging app after a student discovered a security flaw in the new messaging tool.
Social media site, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), launched its Midnight Message Delivery app as a tool for users to send New Year’s Eve messages on December 31. However, a business IT student at Aberystwyth university, Jack Jenkins, reported to Facebook that he was able to view messages and photos sent by strangers using the same new tool.
Jenkins wrote in his blog post: “I just wanted to share this. I don’t know how a site like Facebook can continue to take these kinds of risks. PLEASE Don’t go deleting random messages, but try and delete one of mine that I set up especially if you want.”
Upon being alerted by the young student, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) quickly took notice of the security loop hole in the messaging tool and sent immediate notice to disable the Midnight Delivery app for a temporary period.
Facebook’s spokesman assured users that the issues has been notified and they are “working on a fix for this issue now, and in the interim we have disabled this app on the Facebook Stories site to ensure no messages can be accessed.”
In his statement to Guardian, Jenkins explained that he was “very surprised to find that this had been overlooked by Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), as it’s such a simple security hole.”
According to Jenkins, the social network might have failed to link all the unique messages to their unique senders in order to ensure their privacy.
The problem came following the news about Mark Zuckerberg’s sister complaining that her own privacy had been compromised when a private family photo was shared on twitter by a subscriber.