Cybersecurity News: ‘We’re Attacked About 100 percent of the Time,’ Facebook VP Says

Facebook is one of the world’s most popular social networks. The social media giant boasts over one billion users, but the popularity and high user engagement can come with challenges. Cybersecurity issues at Facebook was included in discussions at a CEO round table during the annual Telecom Exchange conference held at Cipriani Wall Street in June.

Moderator Evan Kirstel, social media business strategist at UCStrategies.com, asked each of the four panelists this to kick off the discussion, which included insightful information on how companies have to always be one step ahead in order to prevent the next security threat.

“You’re never secure. You’re always only a little further away from being hacked,” said Najam Ahmad, vice president of network engineering at Facebook. “It’s something that is really unnerving, and it will never be done — in terms of feeling secure.”

Another interesting takeaway from the 40-minute discussion was a comment from Laurent Gil, co-founder and chief product officer of ZENEDGE, who talked about the array of attacks on APIs.

“We see a lot of really disturbing activities on the traffic on API’s in general between bot versus human traffic,” he said. “We see bots that behave like humans. They’re really hard to catch because they really look like a person behind the screen, but in fact it’s really a machine you’re fighting against. And then we also see humans that behave like bots.”

The panelists concurred that cybersecurity is a never ending battle, especially on social media networks like Facebook.

“We’re attacked about 100 percent of the time. Something is always going on,” Ahmad said. “You see the attacks on several different fronts — it’s not one specific thing.”

Leo Taddeo, former special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York cyber division and current chief information security officer at Cyxtera and George Kaichis, chief technology officer at WireIE, were the other members of the panel.