San Francisco: Facebook is getting an
unwelcome look at the shady side of the hacking culture that CEO Mark
Zuckerberg celebrates.
Intruders recently
infiltrated the systems running the world’s largest online social
network but did not steal any sensitive information about Facebook’s
more than 1 billion users, according to a blog posting Friday by the
company’s security team.
The unsettling revelation is
the latest breach to expose the digital cracks in a society and an
economy that is storing an ever-growing volume of personal and business
data online.
The news didn’t seem to faze investors. Facebook Inc’s stock dipped 10 cents to $28.22 in Friday’s extended trading.
The main building at
Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters lists its address as 1
Hacker Way. From there, Facebook serves as the gatekeeper for billions
of potentially embarrassing photos and messages that get posted each
month.
This time, at least, that
material didn’t get swept up in the digital break-in that Facebook said
it discovered last month. The company didn’t say why it waited until the
afternoon before a holiday weekend to inform its users about the hack.
It was a sophisticated attack that also hit other companies, according to Facebook, which didn’t identify the targets.
“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,” Facebook
wrote on the blog.
Online short-messaging
service Twitter acknowledged being hacked earlier this month. In that
security breakdown, Twitter warned that the attackers may have stolen
user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000
of the more than 200 million accounts set up on its service.
Late last month, both The New
York Times and The Wall Street Journal — two of the three largest US
newspapers — said they were hit by China-based hackers believed to be
interested in monitoring media coverage of topics that the Chinese
government deemed important.
Facebook didn’t identify a
suspected origin of its hacking incident, but provided a few details
about how it apparently happened.
The security lapse was traced
to a handful of employees who visited a mobile software developer’s
website that had been compromised, which led to malware being installed
on the workers’ laptops. The PCs were infected even though they were
supposed to be protected by the latest anti-virus software and were
equipped with other up-to-date protection.
Facebook linked part of the
problem to a security hole in the Java software that triggered a safety
alert from the US Department of Homeland Security last month. The
government agency advised computer users to disable Java on their
machines because of a weakness that could be exploited by hackers.
Oracle Corp, the owner of
Java, has since issued a security patch that it says has fixed the
problem. In its post, Facebook said it received the Java fix two weeks
ago.
Facebook never mentioned the
word “hack” in describing the breach. That, no doubt, was by design
because hacking is a good thing in Zuckerberg’s vernacular.
To most people, hacking
conjures images of malevolent behaviour by intruders listening to
private voicemails and villains crippling websites or breaking into
email accounts.
Zuckerberg provided his
interpretation of the word in a manifesto titled “The Hacker Way” that
he included in the documents that the company filed for its initial
public offering of stock last year.
“The word ‘hacker’ has an
unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as
people who break into computers,” Zuckerberg wrote. “In reality, hacking
just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what
can be done.”
gulfnews.com
