Facebook hacked by unidentified hacker group

 

 The social media company said the attack was discovered

when 'employees visited a mobile developer website that was

compromised.'

Facebook Inc. said on Friday that it been the

target of a series of attacks by an unidentified hacker group, but it

had found no evidence that user data was compromised.


"Last month,

Facebook security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a

sophisticated attack," the company said in a blog post posted on Friday

afternoon, just before the three-day Presidents Day weekend. "The attack

occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website

that was compromised."


The social network, which says it has more

than one billion active users worldwide, also said: "Facebook was not

alone in this attack. It is clear that others were attacked and

infiltrated recently as well."

Facebook's announcement follows

recent cyber attacks on other prominent websites. Twitter, the micro

blogging social network, said earlier this month that it had been

hacked, and that approximately 250,000 user accounts were potentially

compromised, with attackers gaining access to information including user

names and email addresses.

Related: Twitter hacked, estimated 250,000 accounts compromised


Newspaper

websites, including those of The New York Times, The Washington Post

and The Wall Street Journal, have said they have also been infiltrated.

Those attacks were attributed by the news organizations to Chinese

hackers targeting their coverage of China.


While Facebook said

that no user data was compromised, the incident could raise consumer

concerns about privacy and the vulnerability of personal information

stored within the social network.


Facebook has experienced several

privacy missteps over the years for the way it handles user data, and

settled a privacy investigation with federal regulators in 2011.


Facebook

said it spotted a suspicious file and traced it back to an employee's

laptop. After conducting a forensic examination of the laptop, Facebook

said it identified a malicious file, then searched company-wide and

identified "several other compromised employee laptops."


The

company also said it identified a previously unseen exploit to bypass

its built-in cyber defenses, and that new protections were added on Feb.

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