Firesheep. This free add-on created by a software developer from Seattle, Eric Butler. This new extension for Firefox gives the user full - access to other Internet surfer's accounts, including Amazon.com, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, e-mail account, Google, Yahoo, and Foursquare. Of course this is illegal because accessing a computer without authorization is a federal crime according to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.Through his website, Butler said that the hack was intended to highlight how the website compromise users' personal information. "This is a widely known problem that has been talked about to death, but very popular website continues to fail in protecting their users," said Butler.
Firesheep using the same public WiFi networks to steal cookies in real time from Internet surfers browsing session. Firesheep will livestream for the user a series of links to various sites with passwords and logins enabled, as people access their accounts.
Is Firesheep steal data from Firefox users only?
Firesheep takes private cookies from other browsers, like Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome, although this add-on is only for Mozilla Firefox.
What is the Mozilla's stance on Firesheep break out?
Firefox director Mike Beltzner said that security flaws in other websites are not the company's responsible. "Firesheep is an add-on for Firefox is created and distributed by third party developers. This shows the security weaknesses in a number of popular sites, but does not exploit a vulnerability in Firefox or other web browsers," said Beltzner.
Mozilla recommends that sites start supporting HTTP-STS protocol, which will be supported by default in Firefox 4.