Can Facebook Inc (NASDAQ FB) teach the likes of Target Corporation (NYSE TGT), The Home Depot, Inc (NYSE HD), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE JPM) and other major corporations who have been hacked a thing or two about computer security?

Facebook revealed its data security methods today and it spotlights a system that is both proactive and reactive. The security system has in place elements that prevent access to sensitive data, but if a hacker were to get into the system, their ability to de-code encrypted sensitive user name and password data may make such hacks useless.

The apparent innovative key to Facebook Inc (NASDAQ FB)’s security system, which was revealed today, is the immediate encryption of sensitive information such as user name and password. If a hacker were to penetrate Facebook’s electronic security, what they would find stored in its electronic databases would be a series of string characters, known as hashes, that they say is nearly impossible to decipher. Nowhere in the Facebook system is sensitive information stored in its native format.

Facebook Inc: Security Methods Used

Facebook also searches the Internet to identify if its user’s information is being sold on third party hacking sites. While this may seem like a simple exercise, because Facebook does not store password and user names in simple text format, it gathers suspicious data being sold on the black market and then interprets it through its hash encryption service. Once the data is in hash format it can be compared to the black market information to determine if Facebook user information has been compromised.

“Theft of personal data like email addresses and passwords can have larger consequences because people often use the same password on multiple websites,” Chris Long, a security engineer at Facebook Inc (NASDAQ FB), told Information Week. “Lots of household company names have experienced the unpleasant phenomenon of seeing account data for their sites show up in these public [‘paste’] lists, and responding to these situations is time-consuming and challenging.

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ FB) Business News

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ FB) has automated the system so it scans for large-scale data breaches and monitors a selection of sites that hackers commonly use to divulge the stolen data. Once the stoical network finds antisocial behavior in the form of stolen credentials, “we pass the data into a program that parses it into a standardized format,” Long said.”

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