#Facebook says 600,000 accounts compromised every day

By Bob Sullivan

Facebook said this week that more than a half-million accounts are compromised every day on the mammoth social networking site.

The revelation was buried in a new security announcement issued by the company on Thursday describing the virtues of its new "Trusted Friends" password restoration technique. UK-based computer security firm Sophos first noticed the data.

The Facebook blog entry includes an infographic explaining the success of the network's efforts to beat back spam, account hijacking, and other ills.  In it, Facebook says that "only 0.06 percent of 1 billion logins per day are compromised."

That might sound like an impressive record, but doing the math, that means 600,000 accounts are hacked or otherwise compromised every day.  Facebook's 0.06 percent figure seems intentionally precise, so it's probably fair to surmise that potentially 18 million accounts per month are impacted.

"If an unauthorized party has logged into your Facebook account, then you're far from alone," wrote Sophos' Graham Cluley in a post about Facebook on Friday.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Facebook ID theft" is a serious problem which lays the foundation for all manner of other cyber misbehavior. Recently, msnbc.com reported on a woman who sent $2,000 to a criminal, believing she was communicating with her sister through Facebook chat. Other common scams include criminals hijacking friends' accounts and trying to talk users into coughing up money. Much cyberbullying also begins with compromised FB accounts.  A woman recently contacted me complaining that her son's account had been hacked and classmates had posted pornographic pictures.

"They changed his email address and his password; so my son could not get into his Facebook," the woman, who asked that she not be identified to protect her son's privacy, said. "Then they posted, more than once, pornographic pictures of men with a cut-out of my son's face on it and posted it as his profile picture. My son is only 15 and those pictures were so terrible that he was embarrassed, humiliated, and devastated over them."

It's not hard to find similar stories about the dire consequences of Facebook login compromises.  One key to solving the problem is making it easier for the rightful holder of hacked accounts to restore their access, and Trusted Friends should help considerably. Still, in a world where consumers are continually adding to the number of identities and imposters they need to worry about, 600,000 daily Facebook identity issues is not a welcome data point