On December 12, the popular social networking web site Facebook amended a lawsuit it filed in June against people that had unlawfully accessed its servers and looked for the web site’s users’ personal details. Facebook’s accusations are based on information offered by two Canadian Internet service providers, Look Communications and Rogers Communications.

The company behind the world’s second most popular Internet social networking web site alleged that in June servers operated by the defendants used automated scripts to make more than 200,000 requests for personal information stored on Facebook’s own servers. Thus, Facebook sued no less than seventeen people and an Internet porn company.

The social networking company first filed a suit in June, but amended the complaint this month after it had discovered the identities of a handful of those people that tried to hack its servers. Only some of the defendants are associated with the company that pays affiliate referrals to porn web sites. The complaint that Facebook originally filed in summer was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and said that a certain IP address tried to access the social networking web site’s system to reap users’ personal information between June 1 and 15, 2007. According to Facebook, despite the fact that this attempt was unauthorized and generated error messages, the defendants tried some 200,000 times to access the information they sought, which forced Facebook to eventually block the IP address.

However, it seems that more IP addresses quickly picked up where the blocked one had left off. Facebook claimed that the whole incident’s investigation cost over $5,000. A few weeks later, Facebook and the associated Internet service providers were able to identify a number of people associated with the IPs that had been pillaging the web site’s servers. Brian Fabian, Josh Raskin and Ming Wu, as well as Istra Holdings, a company associated with the sex web site SlickCash.com, were all fingered by the Canadian ISPs.

Although Facebook hasn’t yet mentioned whether the defendants were eventually able to access the information they sought, the company charges that they violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. They also allegedly breached the Terms of Service set forth by the service that they agreed to upon signing up.

"The Defendants' breach of the Terms of Service have caused and continue to cause Facebook to expend resources to investigate the attempted unauthorized access and abuse of its computer network and to prevent such access or abuse from occurring," said Facebook in the amended complaint.