How Facebook Dealt With The Tunisian Government Trying To Steal Every User's Passwords

If you haven't yet read it, you owe it to yourself to read Alexis Madrigal's fascinating piece at The Atlantic about how Facebook responded to what apparently was a government-run country-wide hack attack on Facebook (prior to the recent regime change) designed to capture every Tunisian user's Facebook password. As the article notes, for all the talk of how much Twitter was used to communicate during the Tunisian protests and eventual ouster of the old government, Facebook may have played an even bigger role.

However, Facebook's security staff had been hearing anecdotal stories from people in Tunisia claiming their accounts had been hacked, along with some indications that something odd was going on. Eventually, they realized that the Tunisian ISPs appeared to be running a giant man-in-the-middle keylogger system, that would record a user's password any time they logged into Facebook. So how do you respond to that if you're Facebook? A two-step approach: force all traffic from Tunisia to run through https: to encrypt the passwords and prevent this from happening and then set up a system for when people logged in, asking them to identify a friend, in order to prove it was really them. Of course, all of this makes me wonder why Facebook doesn't always use https, but that's another question for another day.

While the solution wasn't perfect, it appears to mostly do the job, even if it came a bit later in the process. But just from an outsider's perspective, it is a fascinating story of how various internet tools are playing into world politics, and how that leads to some totally unexpected situations.

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Elisha Cuthbert Ciara Rachel Hunter Heidi Montag Katharine McPhee