Family Member Removal Exploit

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It didn’t take long for Jeff, our family glitch tester, to figure out how and why we lost most of our family members overnight (1). This is a rather serious exploit and would have major consequences if fully disclosed. Zynga needs to fix it as soon as possible and take action against the players who have already used it destroy other families. It is a security breach and the e-crimes department needs to be aware. The rest of this post will assume you are a total douche on a mission to remove members from another family.

The first thing you need to do is gain access into the family you are targeting. A link can be created by using the Mafia Wars Profile link of the family Godfather/Godmother. To see if it worked, I hacked into my boyfriends Facebook account (yeah that’s bad too!).

I clicked on the hacked link and was instantly added to the {ASS} Family. My boyfriend is not Facebook friends with any {ASS} members (including me!). He isn’t a big fan of the game and won’t be happy to see Mafia Wars was once again unblocked on his account.

Here is Justen on the {ASS} Family Roster.

Once you gain access into the family you are targeting it’s rather easy to boot any member who isn’t a Godfather/Godmother or Underboss. Simply go to any player on the roster, right click next to their name and click on “Inspect Element”.

From there, you need to locate a specific bit of code and right click on it and select “edit as HTML”.

Now you need to insert the following hack code. Obviously I’m covering some of it up as this isn’t something that anyone should be doing.

Once you do all of this correctly, the little red x will appear next to the players name.

Now comes the easy part. Just click on the little red x that you summoned.

Click on “Yes” and that player will no longer be a member of the family. Anyone with the know how can do this to any family.

As you can see this process is very time consuming. Someone really went out of their way to do it over 60 times to remove the majority of the members in my family.  To prevent this from happening to your family, it’s best that you make all members a Underboss as the hack will not work on the Godfather/Godmother and Underbosses. If you wait for Zynga to fix it and do nothing, you may find your family victim to this exploit.

Many thanks to Jeff Sanford for figuring out how this was done and providing easy to follow instructions so I could reproduce it. It’s scary that it works but explains why my family lost members. Those responsible should be very concerned.