Hacking Tony Blair

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Last week, former UK Prime Minister and current Quartet Envoy to the Middle East on behalf of the EU, UN, US and Russia, was hacked. Well, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation on Facebook was hacked according to reports at any rate. It seems that the site was flooded with abusive messages aimed at Tony and Cherie Blair rather than those promoting an understanding of world peace as the Foundation intended.

One message said "Your legacy was sealed a long time ago. You can bang your Christian drum for as long as you like" while another commented "Tony Blair was about as good for Britain as the bubonic plague." The Foundation eventually posted a notice which stated "These solicitations are fraudulent and entirely unconnected with the work of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation."

"Reports suggest that Tony Blair's Faith Foundation Facebook page has been defaced with references to Martin Sheen, the actor who played the US President in the TV drama The West Wing," said Richard Kirk, Fortify Software's European Director. "The fact that his page was hackable, however, highlights the need to include code auditing in the software development process, something that whoever created the Facebook application used by the Faith Foundation appears to have overlooked" he added.

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As observed, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation Facebook page was publicly defaced in April 2009; mainstream outlets covered the incident at the time. This kind of page compromise is a reminder that social-media presence is both a communications channel and an attack surface — incidents can stem from compromised admin accounts, third‑party app tokens, or web‑application bugs that allow stored content to be injected and displayed. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)

Root causes to consider when a Page is “hacked”: stolen/weak admin credentials, excessive Page roles, malicious or over‑privileged third‑party Facebook apps, and common web vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, injection, insecure defaults). Organisations should treat social integrations like any other software component and bake secure development and code review into the lifecycle (SSDL/SSDF). Use OWASP guidance to prioritise fixes and NIST SSDF to embed code review, SCA, SAST/DAST and secure defaults into the process. (owasptopten.org)

A short triage checklist for Page owners and admins:

  • Immediately remove abusive posts (preserve screenshots and timestamps as evidence).
  • Check Page Roles and remove unknown accounts; ensure at least two vetted admins for recovery.
  • Force reset of admin passwords and require two‑factor authentication for all admins.
  • Revoke suspicious third‑party app tokens and rotate app secrets.
  • Report the compromise to Facebook via their account/Page recovery flow and follow their guidance. (facebook.com)

Practical developer steps (after admin triage): run a focused code audit of any Facebook app or widget, run SAST and SCA scans, apply output encoding and strict input validation, add anti‑CSRF tokens and CSP, and deploy a WAF where practical. Example: always use parameterised queries rather than string concatenation:

# Python (psycopg2) example
cur.execute("SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = %s", (user_id,))

Follow XSS and input‑validation cheat sheets and the SSDF practices when remediating to avoid recurrence. Preserve logs, coordinate with platform support, and document every step taken. (cisa.gov)

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