
Grrrr.
Can we process the bastards under the CAN-SPAM act? I'm still getting annoying invitations and reminders from people I barely know (or don't know at all) and there is no apparent way to opt out.
Fresh from an IPO in which its bankers sent millions to pre-float insiders by low-balling its price, LinkedIn has been accused of slack security by Indian security Rishi Narang. Narang, who published his analysis of LinkedIn cookie handling here, identified two cookie handling problems: an SSL cookie is used without having its …
LinkedIn sets their login cookie to be persistant, and also does not set the secure flag, so that it will be sent back to them whenever a user visits any page that has a LinkedIn profile or share button on it. This is similar to how the Facebook "like" button works, although LinkedIn seem to rely on getting the URL of the visited page through the Referer: header, while Facebook has it encoded in the query string (also). Normally login cookies expire at the end of a session, or after a short period, as they are only normally needed to maintain state during a logged in session.
This technique lets social network sites build up a record of the sites you visit and associate it with your login profile, so you can be targeted with ads etc.