Here's one Facebook notification you probably don't ever want to receive. The social media giant has just announced that it will now notify users if their accounts have been compromised by hackers working on behalf of a nation state.
In a blog post published on October 16, Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos gave the rundown of the new feature.
The security of people's accounts is paramount at Facebook, which is why we constantly monitor for potentially malicious activity and offer many options to proactively secure your account. Starting today, we will notify you if we believe your account has been targeted or compromised by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state.
Stamos says that the distinction between regular hacking attempts and government backed ones was necessary due to the more sophisticated nature of the latter.
While we have always taken steps to secure accounts that we believe to have been compromised, we decided to show this additional warning if we have a strong suspicion that an attack could be government-sponsored. We do this because these types of attacks tend to be more advanced and dangerous than others, and we strongly encourage affected people to take the actions necessary to secure all of their online accounts.
He also stresses that this notification doesn't mean that facebook as a whole has been breached.
It's important to understand that this warning is not related to any compromise of Facebook's platform or systems, and that having an account compromised in this manner may indicate that your computer or mobile device has been infected with malware. Ideally, people who see this message should take care to rebuild or replace these systems if possible.
The company obviously wouldn't divulge how exactly they know the attacks are coming from state run sources, but they assured users that they are constantly working to make the social network better.
