The internet isn’t all duck face selfies, pictures of cats and viral videos of people slipping in dog sh*t.
It has a dark side too. A dark side that was laid bare by the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that Western governments are using the internet for mass surveillance.
Whilst we’re pretty sure they’re not that interested in what you had for dinner or how many ‘Jagerbombs you smashed last night’, your social media profiles can betray a lot of personal information about you that you might not want in the hands of hackers or governments.
Facebook appear to be taking the threat of spying very seriously. The social media giant has already launched a platform on the ‘dark web’ through the anonymous Tor browser.
They also upped the ante on cryptography – enabling email notifications to be sent from Facebook with end-to-end encryption to keep your password resets secret from prying eyes.
But now the social network will be notifying users if any Government, spy agency or malicious hackers are rifling through your account.
Facebook’s security cheif Alex Stamos revealed in a note on the site that people would be informed if their profile was “targeted or compromised by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state”.
It would come in the form of a warning, which looks like this:
Stamos wrote: “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.
“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.”
If you see this warning message it may mean your computer or mobile device has been infected with malware.
Stamos added: “Ideally, people who see this message should take care to rebuild or replace these systems if possible.”
