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Thursday, December 31, 2009

Courts - "FaceBook App Maker Hit With Data-Breach Class Action"; Indiana connection

David Kravets of Wired's Threat Level has this entry about a lawsuit filed in federal court in California that begins:

RockYou, the popular provider of third-party apps for Facebook, Myspace and other social-networking services, is being hit with a proposed class-action accusing the company of having such poor data security that at least one hacker got away with 32 million e-mails and their passwords.

The suit accuses the maker of apps like “Slideshow” for MySpace and “Superwall” for Facebook of making its unencrypted customer data “available to even the least capable hacker.”

“RockYou failed to use hashing, salting or any other common and reasonable method of data protection and therefore drastically exacerbated the consequences of a hacker bypassing its outer layer of web security,” according to the Monday complaint in San Francisco federal court.

Indiana connection. The press release issued by the attorneys filing the lawsuit begins:
December 29, 2009 / San Francisco, Calif. / An Indiana man filed a class action lawsuit Monday against RockYou, the developer of popular online applications and services for use with social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, after RockYou failed to safeguard the highly sensitive personal information of him and 32 million others. * * *

The lawsuit is brought by Alan Claridge, Jr., of the Evansville, Ind., area. According to the suit, only after the media began reporting about the data breach did RockYou notify Mr. Claridge and others of the data breach.

The complaint is available here.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 31, 2009 10:21 AM
Posted to Courts in general