Facebook Inc (FB) Warns Its Users If Their Accounts Is At Risk Of Being Compromised By Hackers

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has initiated a process to protect the user accounts from hackers. Hacking has been a growing concern for quite some time and the recent hack attacks on banks and retailers has pushed the social media sites like Facebook to take some initiatives against the attacks.   A ‘mailOnline’ article explains in detail about the Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s initiatives against hackers.

facebook FB social media world icon computer internet

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) monitors the web for stolen email addresses and passwords from different ‘paste’ sites and then looks for a match against the passwords used to log into the Facebook app. If the process finds a match, then it notifies the user for possible breach of account. The process also helps the user in creating a new password.

Most of the users are accustomed in using same password for all their accounts and a hacked account means that all their accounts are at risk. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s initiatives aims at solving this issue.

“The Facebook Security team has always kept a close eye on data breach announcements from other organizations. Theft of personal data like email addresses and passwords can have larger consequences because people often use the same password on multiple websites. Unfortunately, it’s common for attackers to publicly post the email addresses and passwords they steal on public ‘paste’ sites. Our team wanted to do something to improve this situation, so we built a system dedicated to further securing people’s Facebook accounts by actively looking for these public postings, analyzing them, and then notifying people when we discover that their credentials have shown up elsewhere on the Internet,” Facebook’s Security Engineer, Chris Long was quoted as explaining in a blog post.

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) hashes the user passwords using the hashing algorithm. This hashing process makes sure that a stolen list from Facebook might not help the hackers with password information. But this needs the new process to hash the passwords obtained from ‘paste’ sites and match them against the Facebook user accounts. The entire process is completely automated and Facebook assures the users that the process does not store the passwords.

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) added an extra layer of security, which asks the users to enter the security code from mobile phone, when logged in from a different browser. User need to enable this login approval process.

The article also mentioned about a server in Netherlands, ‘Pony botnet’, which was discovered last year. The server had close to 2 million stolen passwords of many popular sites. The findings were published to more than 90,000 websites, which matched with many customer passwords of different organizations. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) reset the passwords of affected users and intimated them.

 Disclosure: None