Facebook says a “Sophisticated” Hacking Attack has Been Made on Them

By: Ali Raza  |   February 16th, 2013   |   News, Social Media

At the start of this month, Twitter has made it known that 250,000 user accounts have been compromised as anonymous hackers have breached the security and hacked these accounts. On this occasion talking about this security breach the director of information security at Twitter, Bob Lord said that, “This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.” It seems that he was right to an extent because on Friday, February 15, famous social networking website, Facebook released a statement according to which they were attacked in a similarly sophisticated way back in January.

 

However, this attack did not cause any harm, as the data of the users remained uncompromised. Unlike Twitter this cyber assault on Facebook was not directly made by hackers, as the company experienced the problem when its employees accessed a malicious website that installed a bug on the processors of their computers.

 

In its official blog, Mark Zuckerburg’s company stated that, “Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack. This attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised. The compromised website hosted an exploit which then allowed malware to be installed on these employee laptops.”

 

The social networking website also made it known that the computers of its employees were running fully updated versions of antivirus software plus they were also completely patched.

 

Facebook said that, “As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement, and began a significant investigation that continues to this day. We have no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised in this attack.”

 

The company also mentioned that they were not only one who was attacked, as the network of one billion users said that, “It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well. As one of the first companies to discover this malware, we immediately took steps to start sharing details about the infiltration with the other companies and entities that were affected.”

 

At this point in time, Facebook is working with constabulary to find more details about this incident. The company noted that, “As part of our ongoing investigation, we are working continuously and closely with our own internal engineering teams, with security teams at other companies, and with law enforcement authorities to learn everything we can about the attack, and how to prevent similar incidents in the future.”

 

Source: Mashable, Guardian