Sidejacking: The Security Flaw Social Networking Sites Are Ignoring

Firesheep is an open source Firefox extension that allows you to "sidejack" other people's cookies if you are on an open wireless network, giving you access to many websites they are logged into like Facebook and Twitter. It has only been out since October 25, but there are already over 500k downloads of the extension. The software developer that created Firesheep, Eric Butler, claims that releasing this user friendly extension is necessary to pressure web companies into providing better security for their users.

A similar statement was offered by the Men in Grey, who made the above video snooping public wireless networks and displaying what people are browsing on screens outside of their suitcases.

To protect yourself you can use the newly released Blacksheep tool to see who is using Firesheep on a given network, or FireShepherd to crash any Firesheep programs running on a network. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's HTTPS Everywhere add-oncan make it more difficult to snoop your data as well.

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