Sunday 17 February 2013
Facebook hacked, claims no user data was compromised
The social networking giant, Facebook
seems to be the latest victim of online security breach as it has
admitted that the website was hacked last month by an unidentified
hacker group, but adds that the company hasn’t found any evidence of
user data being compromised.
Facebook, on it’s official blog confessed that it was under attack last month and said,
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.
Facebook adds that as a part of it’s
ongoing investigation, it’s engineering team is working closely with
law enforcement authorities to learn more about the attack and to
prevent similar attacks in the future.
After the initial round of
investigations, Facebook found out that the hack was possible due to a
“zero-day Java exploit” , which is a known vulnerability in Java and has
been under the scanner since the past few months. As soon as the
exploit was discovered, Facebook reported it to Oracle, who confirmed
the findings of the social networking website and provided a patch on
February 1, 2013 to fix this issue.
Facebook also points out that this wan’t
an isolated attack and various other websites too, might have been
attacked in a similar fashion. The company says that it’s been sharing
the information with other organizations which were effected by the
security breach and hopes to work together with them to prevent similar
attacks.
