Social network giant Facebook last week Friday filed a lawsuit against two Ukrainian men for using fraudulent means to steal Facebook users data via browser add-ons.
The accused, Andrey Gorbachov and Gleb Sluchevsky used online quizzes to lure over 60,000 Facebook users into installing malicious browse extensions that stole their profile data and friends lists to offshore servers.
According to the Daily Beast, the two were accused of using browser extensions to overlay their own advertisements onto Facebook's news feed when their victims visited through the compromised browsers.
The lawsuit alleges that Andrey Gorbachov and Gleb Sluchevsky violated California and federal anti-hacking laws, and have been sued for fraud and breach of the social network's terms of service.
"As a result of installing the malicious extensions, the app users effectively compromised their own browsers because, unbeknownst to the app users, the malicious extensions were designed to scrape information and inject unauthorized advertisements when the app users visited Facebook or other social networking site as part of their online browsing," the company said.
The Kiev based entrepreneurs who are affiliated with a company called the Web Sun Group, are said to target Russian-language speaking audience in the fraud scheme.
"In total, defendants compromised approximately 63,000 browsers used by Facebook users and caused over $75,000 in damages to Facebook," the company claimed in its civil complaint, citing the cost of rooting out the activity.
Last month, Facebook shutdown its Onavo data harvesting VPN app and have been working on different ways to regain its users trust by making the social platform more privacy focused. However, the presence of bugs and other server related issues hasn't been aiding the process.