Facebook has recently discovered that few of its employees laptops were hacked, although no serious harm was done.
This was a very fortune of the company that no serious harm was done and the data of Facebook’s 800 million users were not compromised. This news was confirmed by Facebook itself in a news on its blog today.
The blog post state:
“Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack.”
While discovering the way they was attacked, Facebook discovered that “Zero-Day Java exploit” was used as the method of attack. A number of its employees visited mobile developer website that installed malware on their laptop PCs.
The hackers then took the advantage of this weakness in Oracle’s Java software enabled on web browsers.
The company said that the anti-virus software was up to date but it was because of previously undiscovered exploits.
The social network further said that there was also a suspicious domain the company noted in its DNS logs and tracked it back to a worker’s laptop. After the malware was discovered remaining machines were immediately fixed and the security team conducted a company-wide search operation.
This is not only Facebook which was attacked, the blog post further read as:
“Facebook was not alone in this attack, It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well.”
Remember in the beginning of the Feburary the twitter was also hacked, affecting 250,000 user accounts. Not only that but NY Times and Wall Street Journal were also compromised by hackers.
However, there seems no connection of Facebook and Twitter hacking accident. But the Director of Information of Twitter asked people to turn off Java on their internet browsers after the attack was made in the early Feburary.
There has been a lot of questions raised about Oracle’s software. It was also noted that Mozilla and Apple has turned the Java off in their every browser. So certainly, turning off Java could be a smart move.
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