Facebook faced with industrial espionage

Representatives of the social network Facebook on Friday said that the computers of several engineers associated with the development of key technologies Facebook, were attacked by a previously unknown exploit Java-by setting unique malicious software. Company representatives say that the result of the attack the user data is not affected, but a complex malicious software was detected on computers "limited group of engineers."

The internal security service Facebook has worked with an unnamed antivirus company to come out to the command server is malicious, a gathering of engineers have stolen data. According to Director of Safety Facebook Joe Sullivan, the servers were also found data belonging to several other companies. He noted that Facebook has notified the companies of their findings, and gave information about the attacks in the U.S. FBI. In the social network said that the investigation into industrial espionage is not over yet.


Sullivan said that the first signs of an attack Facebook specialists found in the logs of several DNS-servers. Further investigation revealed that unknown hackers managed to gain access to a computer engineer, specializing in a number of mobile projects Facebook. Forensic analysis showed the laptop is inside Facebook team attacked systems were several.

According to Sullivan, according to the specific actions of hackers, malicious attack was originally designed for Facebook, as the first of the steps used in attacks on Western companies are not used.

Interestingly, the attack on Facebook in time there was a time when the microblogging service Twitter reported a leak of data on 250,000 user accounts, including the hashed version of users' passwords. Although in most Twitter not informed about who and how could steal, Robert Lord, Chief Security Twitter, said that the attack on the then Twitter has been associated with the plugin Java and called through his blog disable Java plug-in browsers.

In Facebook and Twitter said that to attack their employees are faced with a wave of fraudulent spam target, with which staff were redirected to fake sites where their computers were infected with malicious software. Joe Sullivan of Facebook said that in this case, the attackers used their company's Java-exploit that works even in the latest version of Java 7 Update 13. He noted that Oracle has notified another critical issue in Java 7.

Sullivan also said that used Java-exploit works in Mac, as well as in Windows. Now the signature of the malware has already been added to many popular antivirus products.

The company, commenting on the latest attack, said that it had nothing to most social networks and user data, this time the attackers were trying to deal with it in industrial espionage, hunting for technological developments, the largest social network in the world.

Facebook is nothing about where the tracks were hackers.