For the first time in its history Facebook has revealed how many times hackers try to access other people’s accounts and it equates to 600,000 logins of a reported 1 billion logins Facebook serve in a 24-hour period.
The numbers were revealed in a blog post we talked about last week, which details new ways Facebook is going to protect their network.
Security experts have said that the 600,000 figure is “a big concern” although it’s only 0.006% of logins – they do warn users should be more careful when choosing their password for the social networking site.
Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, a computer security organisation, said: “When a Facebook login is compromised, it means that someone else, the hacker, has taken control of that account.
“When a hacker takes over a user’s Facebook account, they can post images, send messages and access all of that person’s private information in one fail swoop. Facebook has had a lot of security issues which it is now trying to address.”
Apparently one of the most common reasons for hackers breaching Facebook accounts is attempts by scammers to sell counterfeit goods and benefit financially.
According to Cluley is not hard for hackers to crack users accounts as 30% of people online use the same password across the entire spectrum of websites they visit and are members of.
The security experts advise internet users to choose more complex passwords in order to avoid any of their personal online accounts being breached and suggest that you should have different alpha-numerical passwords for each site you use.
Facebook is the largest social network in the world with more than 800 million members who spend more than a total of 700 billion minutes on the site per month.
Half of the UK now have accounts on the site which was created and still run by Mark Zuckerberg, a 27 year-old technology entrepreneur. The average user has 130 friends on the service.
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