In the wake ofbombshell reputation of a massive data breach that may have compromised the personal info of as many as 533 million exploiter , Facebook has institutionalize perfectly to trying to birl the passing water as old news , no big deal , definitely nothing to see here , no penury to even conceive about this too much at all , really .
In ablog postpublished after 6 p.m. on Tuesday night , Mike Clark , Facebook ’s mathematical product management manager , direct advert to an April 3Business Insiderarticle that reported that a cyber-terrorist had published the personal data of century of million of Facebook users online for innocent over the weekend . In the billet , however , Clark essay to minimize the breach as a antecedently reported - on threat — one which is no longer fighting or pertinent to current users .
“ We believe the data in question was scraped from people ’s Facebook profiles by malicious histrion using our contact importer prior to September 2019 , ” Clark write . “ … When we became cognizant of how malicious actors were using this feature in 2019 , we made changes to the inter-group communication importer . In this case , we update it to forestall malicious actors from using software to imitate our app and upload a large circle of headphone numbers to see which ones equalize Facebook users . ”
Photo: JOSH EDELSON / Contributor (Getty Images)
Facebook also sound out that it ’s “ confident that the specific outcome that permit [ hackers ] to come up this data in 2019 no longer exists ” — but that will in all likelihood be little comforter to exploiter whose datum is presently sitting exposed in an online trove for all the world to see .
The access that Facebook know of the hacks as betimes as 2019 , but opt not inform user that their data had been compromise , is pretty wild in and of itself , particularly in lighter of theCambridge Analyticadata scandal that rocked the caller less than five years ago . And yet , Clark ’s insinuation that the data break is a non - chronicle is also being echoed by Facebook ’s cronies all over Twitter , with communication theory officials Liz Bourgeois and Andy Stone chiming in on April 3 with statements about how reports of the falling out were based on “ old data ” and that Facebook had “ found and fix this issue in August 2019 . ”
That timeline becomes more interesting when you remember that in 2018 , the European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation , or GDPR , which , among other things , exists to ensure that big , data - mining tech giant like Facebook are more gauzy with users about how their information is being used — which include disclosing instances where their data has been compromise . But in its ownstatementon the breach , the Data Protection Commission of Ireland recently claimed that Facebook responded to its request for illumination by apprize that the datasets appear to have been scratch between June 2017 and April 2018 — handily , just one month before the GDPR went into effect .
“ Because the scraping took place prior to GDPR , Facebook choose not to notify this as a personal data break under GDPR , ” the post reads .
How very prosperous for Facebook that these datum breaches would have been caught just one month before the platform was compel to report them to the public , and that the fixes to the vulnerabilities were so exhaustive that user do n’t even need to worry about the specifics of them after the fact . Looks like there ’s nothing more to see here , folks !
The information leak in question , originally published in a “ crushed - grade hacking forum , ” according to Insider , exposed data from user in at least 106 countries , including over 32 million based in the US , and included personal identifiers such as phone number , Facebook IDs , full names , locations , birthdates and , in some casing , electronic mail addresses . If you ’re interested in checking to see if you ’ve been compromised , the websitesThe News Each DayandHaveIBeenPwnedhave dewy-eyed tools you’re able to use to cross - reference your phone number with what ’s been leaked online .
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