In a fresh saga of bizarre-hacking, facebook came under attack when graphic and porn images started showing up on users’ profiles and news feeds. According to facebook, the hack was a result of a browser-exploit. The social network giant says it has removed most of the images from users’ profiles and is working to eliminate the problem entirely.
How the attack was done?
Apparently, some people on facebook are naive enough to click random links selling them lucrative offers from ‘see how cool your browser will look when you run this script’ to other enticing statements. Once the user clicks the link, it causes a ‘cross-site scripting, causing the graphic or porn images to upload on News feeds and then spread to other profiles. According to facebook, the attack seems to have no financial motive and was meant purely for malicious intents.
Although this kind of attack, known as XSS scam, is pretty common and well-known, a large number of users just can’t help clicking the suspicious links out of curiosity. And that’s precisely what made this current attack so successful.
However, facebook states that it has taken measures to filter out the unsuitable content as well as to reduce the possibility of attacks. While the offensive and profane content has been removed from most users’ profiles, it still continues to pop up on many News Feeds. Facebook has vowed to continue taking measures iteratively so that such an attack can’t harm user profiles again. What remains to be seen is that who exactly is behind the attack? Given the fact that the well-known hacking group, Anonymous, recently vowed to launch an attack on facebook, analysts have speculated that this may be an attack from them.
Image courtesy marcopako.
