The world’s number one social media network Facebook has admitted that is was hacked some time last month. A blog post by FB said Facebook Security had discovered that its systems had been targeted in a ‘sophisticated attack’. FB has added that as far as it was aware, there was no compromise of users’ data. This attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised, was the explanation given. The social network added it had taken corrective steps.

Giving a detailed explanation of what had happened, Facebook Security said the compromised website had hosted an exploit which had then allowed malware to be installed on these employee laptops,even though the latter were running up-to-date anti-virus software. As soon as the intrusion was discovered, FB called in the cops, initiated remedial action on all the infected machines, and began more investigations of its own.

Facebook Security insisted that the attack was aborted because of its team dedicated to tracking threats and monitoring FB infrastructure for attacks 24X7. Last month’s attack, too, was detected when this team flagged a suspicious domain in the corporate DNS logs and tracked it back to an employee’s laptop. Upon conducting a forensic examination of that laptop, it identified a malicious file, and then searched company-wide and flagged several other compromised employee laptops.

A security patch was installed on February 1.

Facebook also revealed that it was not alone in this attack. The post claimed others were attacked and infiltrated, too, though it did not name them.

Image credit: Facebook

Advertising Message