Agency fears Facebook facility in Sweden’s North could draw hackers

Facebook chose Lulea, Sweden, for its new server farm partly the cold climate will help keep its servers cool and partly because of access to renewable energy from nearby hydropower facilities. (Scanpix, Sweco, The Node Pole/Associated Press)A new Facebook server center being built in the north of Sweden may become a target for hackers, according to the Swedish Defence Research Agency.

“If hackers can succeed in gaining access to data, there are likely some accounts that they can use to get money or political power from,” says David Lindahl, an IT-security expert with the Agency.

In the U.K., hackers have managed to access sensitive information held by authorities by using social media to hack into the private computers of employees.

Lindahl speculates that the hackers pretended to become friends with the children of personnel working at the authority.

If hackers can get something onto the employee’s computer that the employee takes to work, they can get past firewalls and infect other computer equipment.

The Swedish Defence Research Agency fears that hackers may similarly target the server center’s personnel, according to Swedish Radio News.

The server center being built in Luleå is Facebook’s first to open outside of the U.S., and will start operating in the spring. The center will handle information from Facebook’s 350 million users in Europe.

At the moment, the server facilities, which look about the size of 11 or 12 hockey rinks lined up one after another, are fenced off.

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