Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Check the link below for a detailed report

For Tunisians, it was another run-in with Ammar, the nickname they've given to the authorities that censor the country's Internet. They'd come to expect it.

In the days after the holiday, Sullivan's security team started to take a closer look at the data, but it wasn't entirely clear what was happening. In the US, they could look to see if different IP addresses, which identify particular nodes on the network, were accessing the same account. But in Tunisia, the addresses are commonly reassigned. The evidence that accounts were being hacked remained anecdotal. Facebook's security team couldn't prove something was wrong in the data.  It wasn't until after the new year that the shocking truth emerged:

Ammar was in the process of stealing an entire country's worth of passwords.

The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

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