Facebook Sues Ontario Porn Company Over Alleged Hacking

by Rob Walker | December 17, 2007 at 01:22 pm

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Apparently this company was allegedly hacking into facebooks user base, to force people to send messages with the company's website in it to other members.

Facebook is suing a Toronto-based porn company and 17 people for allegedly trying to hack the social networking site for the personal information of its users.

According to an amended statement of claim filed by Facebook in San Jose, Calif., Istra Holdings Inc. — which does business online under the name SlickCash — and the other defendants attempted to access its servers more than 200,000 times in June. SlickCash offers advertising commissions to web publishers for directing surfers to its collection of adult sites.

"The defendants knowingly and without permission took, copied, or made use of, data from Facebook's proprietary computers and computer network," said the amended statement of claim, filed last Wednesday.

Facebook did not say what information was stolen. The company said the attacks caused it to incur costs of $5,000 US and that it intends to seek additional damages, saying its reputation had been "irreparably" harmed.