Facebookers Being Targeted by Hackers Funded by Unknown Nation States

Facebookers are being targeted by cybercriminals who are backed by an anonymous nation-state, said Alex Stamos, Facebook's Chief Security Officer, as per news reported by techworm.net on October 19, 2015.

He noted that Facebook will start alerting its patrons when their account is being aimed or hijacked by a cybercriminal suspected of operating on behalf of a nation.

The notification patrons will see when Facebook identifies that they are likely being assaulted by a state-sponsored cybercriminal advises them to switch on its 2FA (two-factor authentication) trait, Login Approvals, which wants the patron give Facebook their contact number.

We decided to illustrate this supplementary warning if we have a powerful doubt that an assault could be backed by the government. We did this since these kinds of assaults tend to be increasingly sophisticated and hazardous when compared to others and we stoutly persuade affected populace to take the desired actions to protect all of their web accounts, added Stamos, as accords to another statement published by ZDNet.com on October 19, 2015.

Facebook won't reveal how it detects when a nation-sponsored cybercriminal is assaulting a definite user, though there are multiple strands of known malware that are alleged to have been created by government-sponsored hackers, such as the Stuxnet, thought to have been created by the US, Duqu, DarkSeoul, allegedly from North Korea, ShadyRAT by China, and The Dukes malware by Russia.

To defend the reliability of our techniques and procedures, we frequently won't be able to elucidate how we point certain assaults to suspected cybercriminals. That said, we aim to employ this alert only in conditions where the proof strongly backs our conclusion. We anticipate that these alerts will help those individuals in want of shelter, and we shall carry on improving our capability to thwart and identify assaults of all types against public on Facebook, concluded Stamos, as accords to a statement published by securityweek.com on October 19, 2015.

Facebook is not the sole online firm to release such a warning, as a similar one was issued by Google in June 2012 when it discovered that Gmail users were hit by state-sponsored attackers.

» SPAMfighter News - 10/28/2015