Facebook: Hacked by “Sophisticated” Attack, No User Data Compromised

The Truth Behind The News

Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
February 16, 2013

Friday Facebook announced that “a sophisticated hacking attack” targeted systems that were threatened last month. No user data was “compromised” as employee laptops were infected with malware.
Facebook said: “As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement, and began a significant investigation that continues to this day.”

The security team for Facebook first identified the problem as a suspicious domain in the company’s corporate DNS logs. This led to the tracing to an employee’s laptop where the malware was discovered. To the security team, this event appeared as a “sinkhole” usurping control over network traffic, according to Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Facebook.

Sullivan explained: “This looked like a new campaign that wasn’t linked to previous Advanced Persistent Threat activities.”

Facebook stated: “After analyzing the compromised website where the attack originated, we found it was using a ‘zero-day’ (previously unseen) exploit to bypass the Java sandbox (built-in protections) to install the malware.”

It was confirmed that “the attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised.”

The attack was categorized as “zero-day Java”. Facebook maintains that they remained relatively unscathed by the attack, while other social media corporations did not fair as well.

Rose Gottemoeller, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, has offered using social media to keep track of the world’s terrorist and terrorism. Gottemoeller envisions utilizing social media users as an effective way to keep atomic bombs out of the hands of terrorists, as well as the control of governments and regimes.

An ordinary citizen becoming more involved is a great benefit to the US government in their mission to use the false flag of terrorism to sway public opinion. Gottemoeller says using social media as a crowd-sourcing tool is an effective in helping the U.S. and other governments “understand what’s going on with a nuclear facility in a certain country, for example, or what’s going on with the production of chemicals at a chemical plant.”

Promoting citizen trust of government has become an imperative. Gottemoeller thinks, “We think that this is a realm where governments can actually partner with their citizens in order to make the case that they are fully living up to their arms control obligations”.

The Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it. DARPA unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt at detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media.

In March, a letter from Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, where he redefines “hacker” as meaning “building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done” and those “hackers” are “idealistic people” who have a “positive impact on the world.”

The National Security Agency (NSA) recruits students from colleges and universities in a program that looks for the next generation of American-grown hackers.

Steven la Fountain explains that new hires must be able to decipher the inner workings of computer imputation to assist the US government in being the superpower of the technology world. “We are not asking them to teach kids how to break into systems, we’re not asking them to teach that. And a lot of them have said they wouldn’t teach that,” la Fountain adds. “We’re just asking them to teach the hardcore fundamental science that we need students to have when they come to work [at the NSA].”

Zuckerberg then refers to the NSA Utah Spy Center that “should be up and running in September 2013” which will connect all servers and routers and store all digital data in “near-bottomless databases” including private emails, cell phone calls, Google searches in conjunction with paper trails like receipts, traffic tickets, retail purchases to create detailed profiles on every American citizen.

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