Social networking giant
Facebook
has named several defendants in a lawsuit alleging unlawful access to its
servers in an attempt to steal information about its users.
Canadian porn site operator
SlickCash
allegedly tried to access Facebook's servers at least 200,000 times over two
weeks in June using an automated script that attempted to harvest information
from other Facebook users.
The suit was amended to name SlickCash along with Toronto residents Brian
Fabian, Josh Raskin and Ming Wu, as well as Istra Holdings, which owns
SlickCash.
The
lawsuit
(PDF) was originally filed in June in a US District Court in California against
10 unknown individuals and 10 unknown companies.
But the names were added after Facebook obtained court orders forcing service
provider
Look
Communications to hand over subscriber information connected to two IP
addresses associated with the attack.
"These requests for information from Facebook generated error messages and
were detected as unauthorised attempts to access and harvest proprietary
information belonging to Facebook," said David Chiappetta, Facebook's lawyer.
The legal filing claims that the attack cost Facebook over $5,000. The
company is seeking undisclosed financial damages.
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