DHAKA: Facebook has announced a new system for alerting users when their accounts have been compromised by ‘state-sponsored actors’, the latest measure taken by the social network to convince users that it is a partner against unlawful government surveillance and espionage.
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, said in a post over the weekend that a warning message will now pop up any time a user tries to log into an account believed to be targeted by a ‘nation-state’, Al Jazeera publishes this report on October 21.
According to a screenshot of the new warning, it reads, ‘We believe your Facebook account and your other online accounts may be the target of attacks from state-sponsored actors’.
It then instructs the user to switch on login approvals, which require the user to enter a security code sent by phone.
The warning is the latest public effort by Facebook to introduce new security protections for its users, possibly to roll back some of the damage to its reputation in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks.
They revealed that Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants like Google and Microsoft were actively collaborating with the National Security Agency’s PRISM data-collection program, calling into question Facebook’s status as a global platform for free expression.
Ever since, the security leadership at Facebook has shifted gears.
Earlier this year, it became the first major social media platform to introduce a ‘dark’ version of its website, allowing users to hide their location by logging in via the surveillance circumvention software TOR.
One interpretation of Facebook's new ‘state-sponsored’ warning system is as a public relations push ‘to assuage fears outside the US, since Facebook has been collaborating with US government entities and handing over data’, said Franz-Stefan Gady, a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute and a founding member of the Worldwide Cybersecurity Initiative.
Alternatively, it could also be a message to ‘whomever is mining these systems’ that Facebook is cracking down.
BDST: 1251 HRS, OCT 22, 2015
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