Facebook has now stated it is the latest company to fall victim to another cyber attack by an unidentified hacker group, but added that there’s no evidence that the attack affected any of the company’s user data; Facebook revealed the details in a post on its security blog.

“Last month, Facebook security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack,” the company said in a blog post posted on Friday afternoon, just before the three-day Presidents Day weekend. “The attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised.”

The Social Network, which says it has more than one billion active users worldwide, also said: “Facebook was not alone in this attack. It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well.”

However, Facebook declined to comment on the motive or origin of the attack.

The Blog post stated that the problems were caused due to a number of its employees checking out an unnamed mobile developer website on their laptops that had become infected with malware. The laptops themselves had malware installed on their PCs after they visited said website. Facebook added:

 “In this particular instance, we flagged a suspicious domain in our corporate DNS logs and tracked it back to an employee laptop. Upon conducting a forensic examination of that laptop, we identified a malicious file, and then searched company-wide and flagged several other compromised employee laptops.”

Facebook’s announcement follows recent cyber attacks on other prominent websites. Twitter, the microblogging social network, said earlier this month it had been hacked and that about 250,000 user accounts were potentially compromised, with attackers gaining access to information, including user names and email addresses.

Newspaper websites, including those of The New York Times (NYT.N), The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, have also been infiltrated. Those attacks were attributed by the news organizations to Chinese hackers targeting coverage of China.

In its statement, Facebook said the attack was launched using a “zero-day,” or previously unknown flaw in its software that exploited its Java built-in protections.

“Zero-day” attacks are rarely discovered and even more rarely disclosed. They are costly to launch and often suggest government sponsorship.

In January 2010, Google reported it had been penetrated via a “zero-day” flaw in an older version of the Internet Explorer Web browser. The attackers were seeking source code and were also interested in Chinese dissidents, and Google reduced its operations in the country as a result.

Attention to cyber security has ratcheted up since then and this week President Barack Obama issued an executive order seeking higher safety standards for critical infrastructure.

Other companies stand to benefit more from comprehensive legislation, which has stalled in Congress. Republicans have opposed additional regulations that would come with mandatory security standards.

What ever the technical flaws, Facebook ’ s security reputation is under serious scrutiny here. Seems like with the recent cyber attacks being successful on the world’s most famous social network giant, Facebook may soon lose its popular stature of the ‘unhackable, highly secure’ tag running among the internet. Looks like it is indeed as they say, Nothing is safe, or it seems so unless provided with more secure ways to these “Zero day” attacks. Hope this works as a Wake up call to not only Facebook but also other websites to enhance their security! what do u think?

2013 is already starting to be a ripe year for security breaches, with Twitter today reporting that their security systems were breached and information for around 250,000 accounts may have been accessed. Twitter’s Director of Information Security Bob Lord says that usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted passwords were potentially accessed, but nothing more serious than that.

As Twitter’s stored passwords were encrypted there’s little chance that the hackers could reveal the actual, plain text password, but as a “precautionary security measure” Twitter has reset the passwords and revoked session tokens for all affected accounts. If you were one of the 250,000 accounts affected, you should shortly receive an email informing you that you’ll need to create a new password; this is a very small percentage of overall users, so don’t expect to receive an email.

The good news is that Twitter managed to discover the attack while it was in the process of accessing unauthorized data, meaning they could shut it down before more data was accessed. Bob Lord believes that the attack was “not the work of amateurs” nor an “isolated incident”, instead saying that the attackers were extremely sophisticated, and that other organizations may have been attacked by similar methods recently.

Twitter is currently working with law enforcement agencies to try and find the people responsible for this recent attack, while also reminding people (once again) to disable Java on their computers.

So, if you see one of the above such messages on your account, change the password, suspend the account for sometime until you get the green signal from twitter itself, and take the usual precautions.

As they say, looks like hackers are always a step ahead of the security analysts/programmers! what say?

Facebook launched a recommendation bar on Thursday that allows users to discover new articles based on what others in your network are reading and sharing.

When a Facebook user likes an article via the new recommendation bar, the story is published to their Timeline — similar to what happens when you use the Like button — and it shows up in friends' news feeds.

"The recommendation bar is another option for websites — particularly blogs and media sites — to be more social and active, keep people on the site longer, distribute content across Facebook and benefit from referral traffic," a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable.

Here's what it looks like: While a Facebook member reads an article on the site, a small pop-up window displays at the bottom of the screen, which highlights recommended articles and prompts them to like the page, according to a blog post from Facebook developer Jeffrey Spehar on the company's developer page.

"Recommendations are based on content that friends have explicitly liked and shared in your app or website," Spehar wrote.

SEE ALSO: Here’s What Facebook’s ‘Want’ Button Will Probably Look Like

Facebook has been testing the social plugin with sites such as Mashable, Wetpaint and The Mirror. So far, Facebook says, the feature has been successful in getting articles in front of more eyes.

"In early tests, sites are 3x times the click through on the stories it recommends than through the Recommendations Box," Spehar said.

To install the social plugin, users will need to copy a few lines of the Facebook code and paste it onto their site. For more details on how to set it up, you can check out Facebook's step-by-step instructions on its developer page.

"We recommend you include Open Graph markup on your articles so Facebook can properly display them on the site," he added.