Facebook users again hit by phishing, many accounts compromised

On Thursday users of Facebook were again hit by hackers attack. According to the reports cybercrooks managed to successfully gather passwords from some of them. Spokesman for Facebook Barry Schnitt said on Thursday that the site was in the process of cleaning up damage from the attack. He also said that the social networking site is blocking compromised accounts.

Passwords to the Facebook users’ accounts were obtained by the criminals through the phishing attacks. Hackers broke into some Facebook accounts and then sent emails to friends urging them to click on links to fake websites. The sites which were designed to look like legitimate Facebook webpage were in fact controlled by hackers. Coming to these fake destinations users who clicked the links in the phishing mails tried to log into their accounts and unwittingly gave away their passwords to cyber criminals.

As noted by Schnitt the security team of Facebook believes that the perpetrators wanted to to collect a large number of credentials, then use those accounts at a later time to send spam hawking fake pharmaceuticals and other goods to Facebook members.