Digital Pharma: Pfizer’s Facebook page hacked
pharmafile | July 22, 2011 | News story | Medical Communications | Digital Pharma blog, Facebook, Pfizer
Pfizer has regained control of its corporate Facebook page after hackers temporarily defaced it earlier this week.
A UK group calling themselves The Script Kiddies added unflattering profile images to the page and posted links to news articles critical of the firm.
The company acknowledged its Facebook page had been “compromised” and said: “We have been working with Facebook to understand what happened so we can guard against it in the future.”
Initial speculation focused on whether problems with Facebook had allowed the attack, with some commentators suggesting pharma would start backing away from the social network if that were the case, but the cause seems to be closer to home.
“So apparently, the articles are all claiming the security breach on Pfizer’s page was Facebook’s fault? No … thank Pfizer and Pfizer only,” the hackers tweeted.
During the time the company’s Facebook page was compromised, details of a social media consultant apparently employed by Pfizer were posted to the page, along with claims that he had been in charge of the account.
The Script Kiddies group, which attacked Fox News and posted false reports of President Obama’s death on its website earlier this month, took particular aim at Pfizer’s failed antibiotic Trovan.
The company was sued in Nigeria after a 1996 meningitis trial in which 11 children died during Trovan’s testing, and the case re-emerged late last year in the US embassy cables released by Wikileaks.
The pharmaceutical industry is already cautious about using Facebook, but the biggest challenge it expected was from forthcoming changes to the site’s commenting policy and the loss of control this will lead to.
The changes come into effect on 15 August and are due to force every page on the site to allow comments to be made, though they can subsequently be deleted. The only exceptions are expected to be Facebook-approved branded drug pages (something European pharma rules would, in any case, prevent).
But the hacking of a page on the world’s largest social network, run by the world’s largest pharmaceutical firm, significantly ramps up the pressure on the industry when it comes to its online presences and their security.
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+.
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