Nov 01, 2011
Facebook Immune System (FIS), the massive defence network appears to be successful as Numbers released by the company this week show that less than 1% of users experience spam. Yet it's not perfect.
Researchers have built a novel attack that evaded the cyber-defences and extracted private material from real users'
Facebook accounts.
FIS evolved from basic beginnings into a massive defence network that monitors every photo posted to the network, every status update– indeed, every click made by every one of the 800 million users. There are more than 25 billion of these "read and write actions" every day.
At peak activity the system checks 650,000 actions a second.
The system is overseen by a team of 30 people, but it can learn in real time and is able to take action without checking with a human supervisor.
Yet like any defence based on patterns of known behaviour, FIS is vulnerable to strategies it has not seen before. Yazan Boshmaf and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada,
have exploited this and eluded the system by creating "socialbots"– software that can pose as a human and control a Facebook account.
It's a big challenge because The only network bigger than
Facebook is web itself. That makes FIS one of the largest in existence.
