Some time ago, Facebook got involved in a new scandal. The hype was based around the fact that HTTP cookies saved by Facebook on users’ computers remained there even after they logged out of the social network, thus casting a shadow of suspicion on it developers and created an impression that they could be monitoring users’ activities on other sites.

On September 25, Facebook officials sent a statement to major mass media assuring the public that they were not monitoring users’ activities on other websites.

However, on September 22, the US Patent and Trademarks Office received a patent application for a technology that made it possible to track user’s actions outside a social network.

It’s clear that “to patent” does not equal “to use”, but hardly anybody can guarantee that the social network will not get such functionality in the future.

We did not announce any changes we made in our programs for a long time while we were releasing new versions. Therefore, today we decided to hold a slight review and recall everything.

One of the most important updates was the development of a module for protecting financial information. This is a special script that automatically searches for lines in the program’s logs that are similar to credit card numbers, and deletes them from the monitoring journal. Screenshots made at that moment are also deleted.

These protective mechanisms work only in cases when this is possible and do not guarantee protection in absolutely all cases. The script is gradually being improved to minimize false alarms and errors. It cannot be turned off since its very existence carries out legislative norms.

For the programs Employee Monitor and Terminal Monitor, due to many requests from the users, a feature was added of configuring log storage in a local or network folder specified by the user.

A lot of work was done to improve the support of the latest versions of internet browsers (Opera, Firefox).

There was an improvement to message monitoring in Facebook, the social network.

The Turkish and Polish languages were added to the program interface.

Symantec (a leading information security software development company) is warning that one of the most popular networks in the world, Facebook.com, may have been leaking personal information for several years.

Experts believe that advertisers on the social network obtained information not only on customer profiles but also pages containing photo albums and personal correspondence. Moreover, they have the ability to post fake messages.

The social network’s applications also have a problem with personal information security. Experts believe that leaks are possible from over 100 thousand applications.

Facebook management have been informed of these issues and are already taking steps to guarantee users’ security. However, there has so far been no comment from the company.

Facebook has recently faced a number of information security problems. However, they were all solved in a timely manner and went unnoticed for the users and the general public. For instance, the Facebook team recently fixed a bug that allowed intruders to access personal users’ messages.

This year kicked off with a serious problem for the #1 social network. Two students, Zhou Li and Ruy Wang, found a vulnerability which allowed malicious websites to access Facebook users’ private data and spam their accounts.

By the time the students identified and described this scheme, it had been actively used by fraudsters who also used phishing sites that imitated popular online resources and services.
Facebook immediately reacted to the news and fixed the bug, which allowed it to prevent a major security scandal.

Graham Cluley from Sophos, an information security company, says that “Facebook is an extremely complex software system and occasional findings of security vulnerabilities are virtually inevitable”.