Fight Firesheep with FireShepherd

Earlier this week, a login-cookie-snooping Firefox plug-in called Firesheep rocked the Internet by letting anyone compromise your Facebook or Twitter account over a wireless network. Alarmed at Firesheep's 200,000 downloads, an Icelandic engineering student named Gunnar Sigurdsson created FireShepherd, a program that crashes Firesheep with floods of nonsense packets.

Although Firesheep was originally created to prove a point about insecure login credentials on social networks, the huge number of downloads means that it could be a security risk to everyday users. Sigurdsson compares it to "living in a house with nothing but windows." Of course, security researchers or malicious users could patch up the Firesheep flaw that FireShepherd exploits, but FireShepherd's creator has vowed to keep finding new ways to stop the snooping plug-in.

[via Forbes]

Tags: cookies, facebook, firefox, firesheep, fireshepherd, hacking, https, passwords, security, ssl, twitter