Facebook to alert users if foreign governments try to hack accounts

Facebook announced that it has started alerting users when foreign governments try to access their accounts.

“Starting today, we will notify you if we believe your account has been targeted or compromised by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state,” the company wrote in a Friday statement that went virtually unnoticed by the media until this week.

“While we have always taken steps to secure accounts that we believe to have been compromised, we decided to show this additional warning if we have a strong suspicion that an attack could be government-sponsored,” Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, wrote in a post. “We do this because these types of attacks tend to be more advanced and dangerous than others, and we strongly encourage affected people to take the actions necessary to secure all of their online accounts.

“It’s important to understand that this warning is not related to any compromise of Facebook’s platform or systems, and that having an account compromised in this manner may indicate that your computer or mobile device has been infected with malware,” the statement said. “Ideally, people who see this message should take care to rebuild or replace these systems if possible.

“To protect the integrity of our methods and processes, we often won’t be able to explain how we attribute certain attacks to suspected attackers. That said, we plan to use this warning only in situations where the evidence strongly supports our conclusion. We hope that these warnings will assist those people in need of protection, and we will continue to improve our ability to prevent and detect attacks of all kinds against people on Facebook,” the company said.

The latest notification system is similar to one implemented by Google for Gmail users three years ago, Fortune magazine reported.