Often, software hackers are the activists that push software giants towards updating vulnerable applications. In todays example, [Eric Butler] is pushing Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and more all at the same time. By creating a user script-kiddie friendly extension for Firefox, he has allowed just about anyone to sniff unsecured connections on public Wi-Fi access points and log into these unprotected accounts.

Right now the extension is available for Windows and Mac, with a Linux port coming soon. Temporarily, the best way for a user to avoid getting taken advantage of would be to not use these social networking sites on a public connection, or to implement a secure proxy for these connections that would keep your data safe. Hopefully these websites will have a quick rebuttal that allows for security without workarounds. With all of the bad press they are recieving, they certainly have incentive to.

Are there any software or security buffs out there? We would love to see someone port this to an iPhone or Android app that could check and log open Wi-Fi points. We’ll leave the foot work to the experts out there, but do be sure to give us a heads up if anyone manages to make it happen, okay?

XSS-Me is a Firefox add-on that loads in the sidebar. It identifies all the input fields on a page and iterates through a user provided list of XSS strings: opening new tabs and checking the results. When this process completes you get a report of what attacks got through, what didn’t, and what might have. The upcoming 0.3 version will use heuristics to determine what characters can be used and automatically skip attack strings that won’t get through.

The SQL Inject-Me works almost exactly the same way. It does require a little planning though: you need to tell it what you expect the results page to look like when an attack gets through.

The newest tool, Access-Me, surfs along with you while you’re authenticated to a website and checks whether you can see the same page unauthenticated.