On Monday Joop Dorresteijn, contributing editor at The Next Web, unveiled a vulnerability in Google-owned feed tracking service Feedburner that lets anyone with some basic copy and paste skills and a Netvibes account pump up their blog subscriber numbers into the hundreds of thousands.
The "hack" is a two step affair, involving first tweaking an OPML file that lists your subscriptions, then subscribing to said feed in a simple feed-aggregation tool like Netvibes or My Yahoo. The data will then be fed through Feedburner's counters overnight, with the freshly increased numbers showing up the next morning.
Google is likely to fix the loophole by changing the way subscriptions are counted, either by tracking it on a per-service basis or using a more extensive security system that links up each subscription to a central account system. In the meantime the easiest way to spot blogs that have done this will likely be to keep an eye on abnormally large influxes of subscriptions within a 24-hour period.
You can see a video of how to do this with your own blog below, just keep in mind Google is likely to patch this shortly, although it has yet to acknowledge the vulnerability in the company's Feedburner product blog.
Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.
FeedBurner has announced that both its Stats PRO and MyBrand services will be free from now on. This news is coming a little over a month after Google acquired FeedBurner at the end of May. I will admit that I was a little skeptical when Google bought FeedBurner as to how it would affect the actual service, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.
FeedBurner's Stats PRO is just an enhancement to the regular stats that FeedBurner already provides. Most notably, it contains a stat called "reach" and also item views. As opposed to the number of subscribers that is displayed by FeedBurner, reach is a measure of how many people are "actively engaging with your content." If you want to enable Stats PRO on your account, you have to go and turn it on in your feed's control panel, though it is free for everyone.
MyBrand is a service that really appeals to larger sites that still want the benefits of using FeedBurner, such as stat tracking, but want everything to be hosted on their own domain. MyBrand lets you host your feed and access all of your stats from your domain to make the whole experience very transparent.
So, if you are interested in either of these services, just log in to your FeedBurner account and make the upgrade for free. Hopefully these are just the first of many improvements to come for FeedBurner now that it is backed by Google.
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