Facebook will begin warning users if their account is being targeted or hacked by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state, the company's chief security officer has announced.
In a Facebook post on October 17, Alex Stamos said the company constantly monitored for potentially malicious activity.
In his statement, Stamos said: "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 [Oct 17], 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."
This is what the notification looks like on the desktop version of the Facebook website:
"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 added.
He further said: "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.
However, Stamos did not indicate how often such attacks occurred, but in a report late last year Facebook said the number of legal government requests for data in the first half of 2014 increased by 24 per cent since the latter half of 2013.
"To protect the integrity of our methods and processes, we often won't be able to explain how we attribute certain attacks to suspected attackers. That said, we plan to use this warning only in situations where the evidence strongly supports our conclusion. We hope that these warnings will assist those people in need of protection, and we will continue to improve our ability to prevent and detect attacks of all kinds against people on Facebook."
