Hackers launched an attack on Facebook's 200 million users on
Thursday, successfully gathering passwords from some of them in the
latest campaign to prey on members of the popular social networking
site.
Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said on Thursday that the site was
in the process of cleaning up damage from the attack.
He said that Facebook was blocking compromised accounts.
Schnitt declined to say how many accounts had been compromised.
The hackers got passwords through what is known as a phishing
attack, breaking into accounts of some Facebook members, then
sending e-mails to friends and urging them to click on links to fake
websites.
Those sites were designed to look like the Facebook home page. The
victims were directed to log back in to the site, but actually
logged into the one controlled by the hackers, unwittingly giving
away their passwords.
The purpose of such attacks is generally identify theft and to
spread spam.
The fake domains include www.151.im, www.121.im and www.123.im.
Facebook has deleted all references to those domains.
Schnitt said that Facebook's security team believes the hackers
intended to collect a large number of credentials, then use those
accounts at a later time to send spam hawking fake pharmaceuticals
and other goods to Facebook members.
The site fought off a similar attack two weeks ago, he said.
Privately held Facebook and rival social network MySpace, which is
owned by News Corp, require senders of messages within the network
to be members and hide user data from people who do not have
accounts. Because of that, users tend to be far less suspicious of
messages they receive.
Hackers used a phishing attack last year to spread a malicious virus
known as Koobface (a reference to Facebook). It was downloaded onto
Facebook members' PCs when they clicked on a link sent to them in an
email that looked like it had been sent by a friend on Facebook.
Source:
reuters.com
