Who Hacked Facebook?

The access problem that hit the social media giant Facebook and its platforms WhatsApp and Instagram yesterday evening, beginning at 18:40 Turkish time, partly returned to normal at around midnight after a struggle lasting almost six hours.

Coming after former employee Frances Haugen accused Facebook on Sunday of prioritising user engagement and maximising profit over curbing hate speech and false news, the outage yesterday evening turned attention to Facebook’s owner Mark Zuckerberg.

While no statement has yet come from the social media giant’s CEO, security experts say the outage may stem from an internal failure, though an insider sabotage is also theoretically possible. An outside intervention or a complete hack of the system is regarded as less likely. A massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack capable of knocking one of the world’s most popular sites offline is thought to require serious coordination among many hacker groups or a brand-new, untested technique, also known as a “zero-day attack”.

The most obvious initial cause of the access problem was that the DNS (Domain Name System) service stopped responding. DNS translates the addresses users type into their web browsers into IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, allowing them to view the page they want.

Facebook, with an average of 2 billion daily active users, had opened Monday with shares down 5.3 per cent after the interview broadcast at the weekend, and with this development in the evening the company is having its worst day in a year.

Thirty minutes after the access problems emerged in the evening, a statement from Facebook said: “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

According to some Facebook employees who spoke to Reuters, the fact that the system tools needed to fix the problems were also unreachable made the problem even harder and slower to solve.

Facebook, which also experienced similar access problems in March and July this year, lost 545,000 dollars an hour in digital advertising revenue alone during the outage that began yesterday evening, according to estimates by the Standard Media Index.

Facebook’s Access Problem Revives Cybersecurity Concerns

Although we do not yet have confirmed information on whether the access problem on Facebook and other social media platforms was a cyberattack, the disruption has put the importance of cybersecurity back on the agenda.

According to a World Economic Forum report, the failure of industrial security partners to invest enough in cybersecurity technologies, and their investment in industrial IoT (Internet of Things) systems without taking appropriate cybersecurity measures, bring a high risk of cyberattack. 

With the digitalisation that increased under the impact of the pandemic, all cybercrimes on the internet, such as data theft, embezzlement and the destruction of data, rose by 600 per cent, and according to FBI analyses this trend looks set to continue.

For example, while 197 million records fell into hackers’ hands through data breaches in 2017, this figure rose to 37 billion in 2020. According to data from the IT company IBM, the average cost of such data breaches to companies in the United States, 7.91 million dollars in 2018, rose to 8.64 million dollars in 2020.

According to data published by the German IT association Bitkom, 9 out of 10 companies in Germany fell victim to cyberattacks in 2020-2021. The total damage from these attacks is estimated at around 223 billion euros. Bitkom states that the damage to the German economy this year from data theft, spyware and sabotage on the internet is more than double the 103 billion euros recorded in 2018 and 2019. The study also revealed that companies have increased their investment in secure information technologies against cyberattacks. While 39 per cent of companies spend above average, 24 per cent spend considerable sums on cybersecurity measures.

More examples could be given, but on the whole it appears that the need for cybersecurity will remain on our agenda as an issue of growing importance in the period ahead. It must also be borne in mind that serious agreements against cyber threats, not only nationally but also on a global scale, are now a necessity, and that the world’s policymakers must approach this field more seriously.