Facebook Sues Canadian Internet Porn Company for Hacking Attempt
The Toronto Star reports on the massive hacking attempts of Ontario porn company, SlickCash, on Facebook’s servers.
A Canadian company specializing in Internet porn is being sued by Facebook amid allegations it hacked the popular social networking website’s computers and tried to access the personal information of users, court documents show.
A numbered Ontario company, which does business online under the name SlickCash, along with several people in the Toronto area, are named in an amended complaint filed by Facebook in San Jose, Calif.
The hugely popular information sharing website alleges that, for two weeks last June, the defendants attempted to access Facebook’s servers at least 200,000 times.
“Each of these requests sought to direct Facebook’s computers to send information on other Facebook users back to (the company’s Internet Protocol) address,” the court documents say.
“These requests for information from Facebook generated error messages and were detected as unauthorized attempts to access and harvest proprietary information.”
It wasn’t clear from the documents what information was accessed, but the complaint alleges “the defendants knowingly and without permission took, copied, or made use of, data from Facebook’s proprietary computers and computer network.”
Facebook, with an estimated 34 million users worldwide, allows members to post photos alongside personal information like a birth date, hometown, e-mail address, phone number, and workplace.
As The Register notes, the lawsuit brings more attention to the vulnerability of members’ data on Facebook.
It’s not terribly clear what data was accessed, much less the goals of the alleged attack. Court papers (PDF) allege the defendants uploaded scripted commands to a server run by a firm called Accretive to “gain unauthorised access and launch malicious code” on Facebook’s site.
Facebook encourages users to post personal information such as birth date, hometown, email address, work details and even phone numbers online. This information is shared with a user’s “friends” and, in a lot of cases, other on any network a user cares to join. The social networking utility boasts a membership of 34m users.
Any amount Facebook might hope to gain from this suit is surely outweighed by the damage to its already poor reputation for privacy. More than anything else the lawsuit emphasises that Facebook is an insecure place to post personal information. Since Facebook’s business model, such as it is, relies of people coughing up this information that’s hardly a good thing.