When cyber criminals started to attack probably one of the most largest community or business running online i.e. Facebook. A cat mouse game began which meant some defensive measures taken by the online giant. The measures included providing awareness to the members regarding installing updated anti-virus programs to their PC This anti-virus was, however, developed to steal information regarding bank accounts of the Facebook’s members. This malware was named as “Yahos” which was a Butterfly botnet network devised to enter into somebody’s system illegally and thus stealing some private information from the system.
However, Facebook soon realized that applying defensive strategy isn’t really working much and is costing their business much. So, in turn they applied an aggressive strategy to combat their system. The strategy included investigating the original master mind behind all this stuff and filing lawsuits. This strategy bought about some positive results for the Facebook security team this earlier this week when they help FBI in arresting a group of 11 cyber criminals involved in fraudulent activity of about $850 million. So, Facebook strategy is now clear against the cyber criminal and this was described by their security researcher in these words:
“We’re not happy playing the whack-a-mole game,” said Facebook security researcher Mark Hammel. “We like to be more aggressive and find the root cause of the problem.”
However, Facebook was also attacked before by a group of 5 members through a virus named as Koobface, which was also designed to steal user’s bank accounts through sending spammy ads, videos or links that were consisting malwares. This virus was dealt by the Facebook’s security team by a defensive strategy of filing lawsuit against the this particular virus. The virus closed down in full and security team also indicated the criminals behind all this but they weren’t arrested by FBI.
Allowing criminals to move freely has cost a lot to the Facebook and their aggressive strategy is a good ploy to combat cyber attacks on their system. Though, Facebook hasn’t broke out on how they trace the hackers but there are hints they have provided. These include : analyzing of patterns of the codes on the script of the virus and by locating “patient zero” who is the first person to be affected of the virus, who is the hacker himself. A former security researcher on this Facebook strategy has said:
“Facebook’s approach of identifying the people and putting them in jail is groundbreaking,” said Bilogorskiy, who is now director of security research at the security firm Cyphort. “Nobody else has been able to do that so far.”
But, so far, Facebook has not been affected a great deal by the hacker’s attacks because less then 1 percent of the Facebook users are affected by the attacks. So, all in all Facebook has now developed a great structure and strategy to combat their system over long-term.