On Friday, Facebook admitted that a bug made the private contact information -- either email addresses or phone numbers -- of 6 million users accidentally accessible to Facebookers who downloaded their account histories onto their own computers. Compared to Facebook's over 1 billion total members, 6 million isn't much. But any security flaw has the potential to frighten people away from a website.
Facebook Says Technical Flaw Exposed 6 Million Users
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Online watchdogs detected one of the most disturbing Facebook breaches in December 2019. Over 267 million Facebook users had their personal data exposed on the dark web, possibly for up to two weeks. The dark web is the home of endless criminal activity, so this breach was egregious. By the time the media reported the breach, Facebook had already made security changes that supposedly fixed this vulnerability. In March 2020, however, another 42 million records were found different server and gathered by the same criminal organization based in Vietnam.
Earlier this year, Facebook quietly confirmed that millions of unencrypted Instagram passwords had been stored in plain text online. Since then, Facebook has been on a less than successful privacy public relations crusade, with an off-Facebook privacy tool found to be not quite what it seems, and the revelation that a "technical flaw" allowed children using the Messenger Kids app to participate in group chats with strangers but without parental permission. The latest blow to the new privacy-friendly Facebook facade came just last night as news of a data leak exposing the phone numbers linked to 419 million user accounts broke. This security SNAFU really couldn't have come at a worse time for Facebook, as is evidenced by the efforts to minimize the number of phone numbers concerned. Here's everything that's known so far.
According to a Guardian report, Facebook is trying to play down the impact of this security and privacy mess by claiming that "the actual number of users whose information was exposed was approximately 210m because the 419m records contained duplicates." However, Whittaker has tweeted that there is little evidence of duplication across the databases he has seen. Posting a screenshot of the server, Whittaker pointed out that he was told by way of background "only 217 million are affected," but the screenshot shows that's just one of the multiple databases. "Facebook is under a lot of pressure to try to minimize the number of phone numbers that were exposed," Whittaker said.
The exposed data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses.
This is not the first time that lots of Facebook users' phone numbers have been found exposed online. The vulnerability uncovered in 2019 allowed millions of phone numbers to be scraped from Facebook's servers in violation of its terms of service. Facebook said that vulnerability was patched in August 2019.
In its biggest privacy scandal to date, Facebook exposed data on 87 million users to the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. This firm got its data through Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher at Cambridge who had access via a quiz app.
In April 2019, it was revealed that two datasets from Facebook apps had been exposed to the public internet. The information related to more than 530 million Facebook users and included phone numbers, account names, and Facebook IDs. However, two years later (April 2021) the data was posted for free, indicating new and real criminal intent surrounding the data. In fact, given the sheer number of phone numbers impacted and readily available on the dark web as a result of the incident, security researcher Troy Hunt added functionality to his HaveIBeenPwned (HIBP) breached credential checking site that would allow users to verify if their phone numbers had been included in the exposed dataset.
In May, security researchers discovered the personal data of more than 100 million Android users exposed due to several misconfigurations of cloud services. Unprotected in real-time databases used by 23 apps, the downloads ranged from 10,000 to 10 million and included internal developer resources.
May 10. Turkish Personal Data Authority fines Facebook $271,000 for bug in an API that allowed third-party apps to access user photos without their permission. It says some 300,000 Turkish users were affected by the flaw.
(AP) -- Facebook is betting that one day soon, we'll all be acting like high school students - more texting and instant-messaging, at the expense of e-mail. Facebook unveiled a new messaging system Monday, and while CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't go as far as declaring e-mail dead, he clearly sees the four-decade-old technology being eclipsed by more real-time ways of communicating. googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2'); ); "We don't think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail," Zuckerberg said.Right now, Facebook's Messages section is a lot like an e-mail inbox. The overhauled version, which will be rolled out to users by invitation in coming months, brings in cell phone texts, IM chats and e-mails from non-Facebook accounts.All the messages stack up in one inbox, and they're organized by the person sending them rather than the type of technology they use. For those who want one, Facebook will hand out facebook.com e-mail addresses - mostly to make it easier to communicate with people who aren't on Facebook."If we do a good job, some people will say this is the way that the future will work," Zuckerberg said.By making e-mail part of its communications hub, Facebook escalates its duel with Internet search leader Google Inc., which shook up online communications 6 1/2 years ago with its Gmail service. Google has said it will roll out more social networking features to counter Facebook's growing popularity, and within Gmail it already lets people chat, e-mail and make phone calls.Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft are also working on incorporating messages from Facebook, Twitter and other social sites into their main e-mail systems.What Facebook has that Gmail and others don't have, however, is people's real identities, plus a map of their real-life relationships and online interactions - something Facebook likes to refer to as the "social graph."Facebook will use what it knows of these relationships to build a social inbox that not only filters out spam but messages it deems less important from strangers or overly chatty friends, and impersonal messages such as the phone bill. Those lower-priority messages will be tossed in a separate folder labeled "Other." Users can also tell Facebook to automatically block messages that don't come from friends.To communicate with a friend, a Facebook user would click on the friend's name rather than hunt for a phone number or an e-mail address. If that friend prefers to get text messages, that's how the message will be seen. If the friend likes e-mail, e-mail it will be.The messaging system, however, isn't e-mail. It doesn't use subject lines or "Cc" fields. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push(); Facebook says it will store every missive sent between two people for eternity, unless they choose to delete it; the company likens it to this generation's equivalent of a box filled with years of love letters.But love letters can sometimes get into the wrong hands. Running a communications service within a social network may increase the chances that sensitive information gets exposed. One of the most common complaints about Facebook is that some updates and photos posted on personal pages are seen by more people than accountholders intended, either because they misunderstood how to program their privacy settings or because of a security breach.Google learned the hazards of melding e-mail with socializing earlier this year when it planted a Facebook-like service called "Buzz" into Gmail. When Buzz launched in February, it was set up in a way that caused many of its early users to inadvertently open up lists of e-mail contacts to outsiders. The ensuing privacy flap elicited an apology from Google, which also recently settled a lawsuit over the misstep.Zuckerberg dismissed notions that the Facebook service, code-named "Project Titan," is a "Gmail killer," as portrayed in the media. At the same time, he said he thinks more people will forgo lengthy e-mail conversations in favor of shorter, more immediate chats.That could lessen the need for people to use communications tools other than Facebook, said Altimeter Group analyst Charlene Li."It may not be a Gmail killer, but it could be nibbler," she predicted.It could also nibble away at other e-mail services from Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and AOL Inc. According to comScore, Microsoft's Hotmail had nearly 362 million unique monthly users in September, the latest available figure. Yahoo mail followed with 273 million and Gmail, the fastest-growing service, with 193 million.Google CEO Eric Schmidt welcomed Facebook's expanded role in online commmunications. "More competition is always good because competition makes the market larger," Schmidt said in a meeting with reporters at the Web 2.0 technology summit. "We are all well served by having everybody online."With Facebook's foray into e-mail, Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, said he'd like to see the company be more open in allowing users to turn to outside software to process their Facebook activities."We ought to be able to take our lists of friends, or our wall contents, or our photo archives easily from one service to another," he said.So far, this is not the case. Users will have to keep an active Facebook account for the messaging service to work. If they decide to leave Facebook, they will lose the messaging service.The first Internet e-mail system arrived in the early 1970s. Though e-mail is still a primary form of communication for older adults, recent studies suggest this is not the case for young people.Text messaging has surpassed face-to-face contact, e-mail, phone calls and instant messaging as the primary form of communication for U.S. teens, according to a 2009 survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.Facebook sees its messaging service as a way to deepen its connection with the more than 500 million users of its network. If it can persuade its vast audience to become faithful users of its e-mail service, Facebook conceivably will have more opportunities to sell advertising that caters to their likes and dislikes.That ambition also could heighten the privacy issues surrounding Facebook as it becomes more deeply ingrained in people's lives and its computers become a treasure trove of personal information.Privacy, to be sure, has been a thorn in 6-year-old Facebook's side since it was born in Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room.Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy watchdog group, called Facebook's move into e-mail "deeply disturbing." He said that under the guise of giving users a new utility, the company "opens up another door that allows it to closely track how their members communicate."Privacy concerns aside, Wedbush Morgan analyst Lou Kerner, who follows social media, sees the feature expanding the site's appeal."It's going to bring some of the remaining holdouts to the Facebook platform," Kerner said. 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 2ff7e9595c
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