5/29/2023 0 Comments Facebook data breach![]() But will it? Enforcements are hard, regulators respond to pressure, and in a news cycle that every day brings fresh new reports of Facebook enabling Nazis or driving teenagers to suicide, this story barely broke through. The Irish Data Protection Commission could act. But so what? It’ll take years and anyway, it’s only money. There will be mass class actions that arise from this breach. Even where there are laws, it operates above them. It’s this culture of impunity that makes Facebook such a dangerous company. What do you do when a trillion-dollar company with 2.8 billion users treats the public with brazen contempt? When it won’t answer basic journalistic inquiries? When it ignores even the regulator? Ireland’s Data Protection Commission – its lead regulator in Europe – released a pointed statement saying that it received “no proactive communication” from Facebook. It later confirmed that it had no intention of informing users because it wasn’t “confident” who they were, users “could not fix the issue”, and anyway, “the data was publicly available”. Instead it published a blogpost, The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data, saying it wasn’t hacked, the data was “scraped”. At an impromptu event on the data breach, journalists from Wired, Politico and Business Insider revealed that it refused to answer their questions too. It passes “exclusive” scoops to favourite reporters, and stonewalls the rest. It uses silence to throttle reporting, a strategy that works. On Tuesday morning I submitted a set of questions to its press office: when was the issue first discovered? Did Facebook inform the regulators (as it is required to under US, UK and EU law)? If so, when? Had it informed users? But Facebook didn’t respond. These are the actions of a company that knows it can get away with it. The news of the latest breach, of 533 million people’s data, dropped over a holiday weekend Facebook responded only by saying it was “old data” and the problem had been “found and fixed in August 2019” – an absurd statement given that the data had only just been dumped on the internet, and clearly that hadn’t been fixed at all. That impunity was in full sight this week. Now the data set has been posted on the hacking forum for free, making it available to anyone with rudimentary data skills.Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs. Motherboard reported on that bot's existence at the time and verified that the data was legitimate. ![]() ![]() Gal discovered the leaked data in January when a user in the same hacking forum advertised an automated bot that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a price. ![]() "A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook's users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social-engineering attacks hacking attempts," Gal told Insider. While it's a couple of years old, the leaked data could prove valuable to cybercriminals who use people's personal information to impersonate them or scam them into handing over login credentials, according to Alon Gal, the chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who discovered the trough of leaked data on Saturday. ![]()
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