Bono Mack Wants Answers On Facebook Attack
November 16, 2011
| 6:09 PM
Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., who chairs the Energy and Commerce subcommittee with jurisdiction over consumer privacy and security issues, wants Facebook to explain how hackers penetrated the social networking site, resulting in violent and pornographic images on some users' Facebook pages.
Mack, chairwoman of the Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee, has asked Facebook for a briefing next week. She will be looking for details on how many users were affected, how the attack occurred, whether the vulnerability hackers used to penetrate Facebook could be used by others to gather personal data about users, and what the company is doing to prevent the incident from happening again, Bono Mack's spokesman Ken Johnson said Wednesday.
"The chairman is very concerned about what took place and wants to make certain - to the extent possible - that it doesn't happen again," Johnson said.
Bono Mack has been working on legislation that would set national standards for what actions companies must take to prevent and respond to data breaches involving consumer data.
Facebook explained the source of the images used in the attack. "During this spam attack users were tricked into pasting and executing malicious javascript in their browser URL bar, causing them to unknowingly share this offensive content," Facebook said in a statement. "No user data or accounts were compromised during this attack...We've built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious pages and accounts that attempt to exploit it."
A Facebook spokesman added that the company "looks forward" to briefing Bono Mack's subcommittee on the incident.
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