The world's largest social media website recently fell victim to a data breach after an employee visited a mobile developer that was compromised. While at this developer, Facebook employees' laptops were infected with malware, which led to the attack on the social media giant.
As soon as Facebook realized the laptops were infected, the company remediated the problem, contacted law enforcement and began the necessary investigation.
With more than a billion active users as of December 2012, there was the potential for a significant amount of personal information to be stolen. However, Facebook has said that no user data was compromised during the incident.
It was found that the source of the malware was developer "iPhoneDevSDK.com."
"Today, we alerted that our site was part of an elaborate and sophisticated attack whose victims included large internet companies," the developer's co-founder Ian Sefferman, told Forbes.
Sefferman added that he was not aware of the attack until he read a blog post on AllThingsD.com.
"Prior to this article, we had no knowledge of this breach and hadn't been contacted by Facebook, any other company, or any law enforcement about the potential breach," he said.
While no user information was compromised in this attack, there is always the chance that Facebook could be a victim of a greater data breach. That said, people on the website should be careful of the information they share.
Apple falls victim to same attack
Facebook wasn't the only large company that was infected with this malware, as Apple was targeted as well.
According to Reuters, Apple workers visited the software development website where their computers were infected with malware that was designed to attack Mac computers.
"Apple has identified malware which infected a limited number of Mac systems through a vulnerability in the Java plug-in for browsers," an Apple spokesman said in a statement. "The malware was employed in an attack against Apple and other companies, and was spread through a website for software developers."
The attack was said to create vulnerabilities for computers using Java, but Apple recently issued an update to the program to help thwart those issues.
Charlie Miller, a prominent expert on Apple security, told the news source that these attacks show that hackers are beginning to spend more time studying the Mac OS X operating system so they are able to complete more sophisticated attacks on Apple computers.
For more information on data breaches check out the IDentity Theft 911 blog.
