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2011

600,000 HACKERS BLOCKED DAILY: FACEBOOK

October 31, 2011 0

Facebook has more than 800 million active users on a daily basis and keeping the impostors out of the social networking site seems to be impossible. Facebook noted that it is blocking almost 600,000 impostors on a daily basis , who attempt to access users’ messages, photos and other personal information. Facebook is the world’s largest social networking site, but they have revealed the shocking figure for the first time. It only shows, how is Facebook bombarded by hackers on a daily basis.

The announcement did not come in directly from the social networking giant, but it came via a blog post, which was related to detailing with hackers. There were a number of new security measures, which were implemented across Facebook to deal with hackers. It is a known fact that if a user’s profile is hacked, then the hacker can post images, send messages and access all of that person’s private information in one fail swoop.

However, the main purpose of hacking someone’s profile is to send out spam messages and pass on false offers to the friend list of the hacked profile. Spams and scams are basically a method of benefiting financially.

One of the ways of hacking profiles is that profiles of many users are being hacked by requesting users to share their login details on fake sites, a process called phishing, which gives hackers access to passwords and email accounts. It was even noted that hackers ease their way into a number of accounts as users use the same password for a number of accounts.

Talking about Facebook’s security features, the social media giant had a number of them detailed. One of them was “Trusted Friends”, a tool which allows users to nominate three to five friends to be sent login codes if the user is locked out of his/her account, that it when his/her account has been hacked.

Interestingly, apps will also have passwords, which means users will not use the same login info for various third party services.

Facebook has never been short of controversies, but it seems the giant is keeping its controversies a side and is working on a few security issues, time and again.

Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley told the Telegraph, “When a Facebook login is compromised, it means that someone else, the hacker, has taken control of that account.” He continued noting, “Facebook has had a lot of security issues which it is now trying to address.