As a Valentine’s Day gift to all its users, Facebook announced yesterday that it has been the target of a sophisticated hack…. for over a month.
Apparently a number of Facebook employees visited a compromised website, which attacked their computers with malware. However, according to Facebook’s post about the breach, no user data was compromised. This is only the latest in a series of attacks directed at big internet names, including the New York Times hack covered in our last post, and attacks on the Wall Street Journal and even Twitter.
From the blog post:
“We have found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised.
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.”
As pointed out in this Huffington Post coverage of the story, nowhere in the blog post is the word “hack” used. This may have something to do with Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto, “The Hacker Way,” which glorifies not the illegal breaching of private data but instead “testing the boundaries of what can be done.”
Read the original Facebook blog post here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/protecting-people-on-facebook/10151249208250766