Hasta La Gadget!

This might be a clue about the hacking going on the past week or so. According the All Things D, a site called iPhonedevSdk (do not visit this site; it’s malicious), is responsible for the hacks of Facebook and Apple. More »

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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When it comes to social networking, most people know that Facebook is by far the largest social network around. Pew Research Center released a survey recently looking at late 2012 for the social networking landscape. As expected, Facebook was in the lead with 67% of Internet users in the United States using the social network.

The battle in the social networking market right now is for the second place spot. Pew shows that 16% of American Internet users are on twitter while 15% are on Pinterest. The two social networks being separated by one percentage point is a very close race and even closer when you consider Pew’s margin of error.

Pew says that its numbers can be off plus or minus 2.6%, meaning that Pinterest could easily be the second largest social network in the world right now. Pinterest is also growing having only 12% of United States Internet users on the network as of August 2012. The fourth place spot for the most popular social network went to Instagram boasting 13% of Internet users in the US on its service.

However, if we again consider the plus or minus 2.6% margin of error Pew admits to, Instagram could easily be the third most popular or even the second most popular social network in the United States. All we know for sure is that Facebook is dominating on a massive scale and it’s a three horse race for the second place spot.

[via Huffington Post]

Pew Research shows Pinterest is larger than many think is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We’re sure that many of you dread the thought of your Facebook account being hacked, especially those who keep their profiles extra guarded and only viewable to close friends or family. In any case it seems that Facebook has recently admitted that they were hacked, and this was actually brought about when some of their staff unknowingly installed malware on their laptops. While the attack is said to have been sophisticated, you might want to breathe a sigh of relief because according to Facebook, while an attack did occur, they claim that no user data was compromised. In a statement released by the company:

Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack. This attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised. The compromised website hosted an exploit which then allowed malware to be installed on these employee laptops. The laptops were fully-patched and running up-to-date anti-virus software. As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement, and began a significant investigation that continues to this day.

In any case we can only take their word for it, but Facebook is said to be currently working with law enforcement agencies and other organizations who have been thought to have been attacked via the same exploit.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Iceland Proposes To Block Internet Pornography, Facebook Lets You Pay To Promote Your Friends’ Posts,

It’s never good when you have to make an official report to the public about a hacker attack your multi-billion dollar social network has had. That’s what’s happened this week as Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan lets it be known that several engineers on staff with Facebook had been the subject of a zero-day Java exploit. The good news is that no customer data was exposed (that’s your stuff), the bad news is that Facebook wasn’t the only company targeted by this attack.

According to Sullivan, this attack worked as a “watering hole”, using an unnamed “popular mobile developer Web forum” as a trap for unsuspecting visitors. When the first user on Facebook’s engineering team visited the site, that engineer tripped a wire, so to speak, that let the zero-day Java exploit begin to take hold of machines at Facebook. The attack here is related back to a Java exploit documented by Oracle earlier this month.

Similar attacks have been popping up recently in several places, one of them relating to Twitter’s recent incident in which 250,000 account passwords were stolen. Another related event occurred with Mozilla as they made Java instances blocked by default – can’t be too careful!

With the Facebook situation it would appear that even the patch from Oracle wouldn’t have helped the engineers as Sullivan notes that this attack was “injected into the site’s HTML.” In this case any user visiting the site with Java enabled would have been infected, bar none. This situation did allow the hackers to gain access to some “corporate data, email, and come software code.” How much and how serious this breach really was is not being made entirely clear.

What is being made clear by Sullivan is that Facebook’s engineers are attempting to reduce the amount of products they use that are dependent on Java. Of course that’s not the end of the story as the hacking attack community rolls on – a cat and mouse game ensues for all time. Check the timeline below for more Java-related history to see how one bit of software history may be on its way out.

[via Ars Technica]

Facebook security reveals zero-day Java attack is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.