Facebook used to get to nude e-mail photos
California man faces six years in prison for computer intrusion, impersonation — Below: — Sometimes social networking makes social engineering very easy. — A California man faces six years in prison for using personal information found …
Context & Ripple Effects
Social engineering cases predate the social-network era — a phisher who impersonated AOL staff faced up to 101 years in prison back in January 2007 — but the mechanics have shifted: instead of spoofing a helpdesk, attackers can now harvest the answers to security questions directly from a victim's own profile.
This case lands in a charged week for Facebook: days earlier Goldman Sachs clients bought $1.5 billion of company stock at a $50 billion valuation, which means the platform's aggregation of real names, birthdays, hometowns and relationships — exactly the material this intruder weaponized — is also the asset base of its valuation.
First-order effects
- The California man faces up to six years for computer intrusion and impersonation, with prosecutors treating profile-scraping-plus-password-reset as a prosecutable felony rather than mere nuisance hacking.
- Victims whose email accounts were breached had private photos exposed through no compromise of the email provider itself — the weakest link was their own Facebook data.
Second-order effects
- Email providers' reliance on 'personal knowledge' recovery questions comes under pressure, since answers like birthdates and schools are now publicly indexed on profiles — pushing providers toward out-of-band verification.
- Facebook faces a reputational tension: the same rich personal detail driving its $50 billion private valuation expands the attack surface available to impersonators targeting its users.
Third-order effects
- If prosecutions like this set the pattern, account takeover via harvested identity data becomes a distinct criminal category with sentencing severity closer to traditional intrusion than to spam or fraud.
- Identity verification structurally moves away from what a person knows about themselves — information social networks make free — toward channels an attacker cannot scrape, reshaping how every consumer web service authenticates users.
The trend: As personal history migrates onto public profiles, social engineering against knowledge-based account recovery displaces technical exploits as the low-cost path into private accounts.