Facebook Reveals It Was Hacking Victim Of A 'Sophisticated Attack'

Facebook has revealed very little about the attack, but the company said in a statement that it was enabled by malware installed on the laptop personal computers of some of its employees who visited a mobile developer website that was compromised.

According to the company: “Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack. This attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised. The compromised website hosted an exploit, which then allowed malware to be installed on these employee laptops. The laptops were fully-patched and running up-to-date antivirus software. 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. We have no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised in this attack.”

A Facebook representative also told Gizmodo via email, “We were able to investigate user data compromise [sic] by forensic analysis on the affected devices and infrastructure.”

At this point, it is unknown why Facebook waited a month to disclose any information about the attack.