A federal lawsuit, filed by the tech giant Facebook, has revealed that two male hackers from Ukraine, used online quizzes to lure more than 60,000 Facebook users into installing malicious browser extensions that violated their privacy and leaked profile details as well as friends list to offshore servers.
As reported by Daily Beast, those two Ukrainian were identified as Andrey Gorbachov and Gleb Sluchevsky. These men allegedly used the browser extensions to overlay their shady advertisements onto Facebook's news feed when their victims visited through the compromised browsers.
On Friday, March 8 the social media company Facebook, filed the lawsuit and alleged that the Kiev-based entrepreneurs violated Californian and federal anti-hacking laws.
The company has sued both the hackers, who are affiliated with a technology company called Web Sun Group, for fraud and breach of Facebook's terms of service.
"As a result of installing the malicious extensions, the app users effectively compromised their own browsers because... the malicious extensions were designed to scrape information and inject unauthorized advertisements when the app users visited Facebook or other social networking sites," Facebook wrote.
They also claimed that in total, defendants compromised approximately 63,000 browsers, used by Facebook users that caused over $75,000 in damages to the company. CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a note while stating a vision of more "privacy-focused" company.
He wrote, "I believe we should be working towards a world where people can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be seen by who they want to see it."
