Spiderman may not have been referring to Facebook when he remembered the mantra, “With great power comes great responsibility,” but he may as well have been. Given the stores of valuable personal data that Facebook houses, the responsibility of protecting it all from malicious attack has become quite the task.
Most recently, Facebook has chased down three hackers who attempted to break into its site to access personal information back in June, according to InformationWeek. Although Facebook filed charges immediately following the attacks, up until now all the defendants have been John Does. The company managed to unmask three of them by taking a list of IP addresses and subpoenas to Look Communications and Rogers Communications, Canadian ISPs that were able to link the IPs to Brian Fabian, Josh Raskin, and Ming Wu.
Apparently, the alleged perpetrators have connections to SlickCash.com, a site dealing in porn site referrals. If successful, the information harvest could have been used for unsolicited e-mail or other seedy marketing ploys.
Facebook claims the effort of tracking down the three men has cost the company $5,000 already. Seven of the 10 defendants in Facebook’s lawsuit still remain unnamed.
