Facebook Reveals About 50 Million User Accounts Affected by Security Breach
Facebook Reveals About 50 Million User Accounts Breach
Facebook says it has recently discovered a security breach affecting nearly 50 million user accounts.
The hack is the latest setback for Facebook during a year of tumult for the global social media service.
In their blog post, the company says hackers exploited its “View As”.
This is the second security breach for social media giant Facebook. Around April, 2018, Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that did work for the Donald Trump campaign and harvested raw data of about 87 million Facebook profiles.
The company Cambridge Analytica is shutting down it’s operation. Facebook exposed data of about 87 million users to a researcher who worked at Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Trump campaign.
Cambridge Analytica was created when Steve Bannon approached conservative mega donors Rebekah and Robert Mercer to fund a political consulting firm.
Bannon became vice president of Cambridge Analytica. During the 2016 election, he reached out to the Trump campaign.
Bannon, eventually became a senior adviser to Trump before he was fired in August 2017. More importantly, the firm got it’s data from a researcher Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian America who worked at the University of Cambridge.
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Aleksandr Kogan built a Facebook app that was a quiz. This app did not only collected data from people who took the quiz but also exposed loophole in Facebook API that allowed it to collect data from the Facebook friends of the quiz takers as well.
Facebook generally, prohibited the selling of data collected with this method, but Cambridge Analytica sold the data. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a response to the scandal at that time, ” I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it”.
Formal Facebook employees have said that there’s a tension between the security team and the legal/policy team in terms of how they prioritize user protection in their decision making.
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“the people whose job is to protect the user always are fighting an uphill battle against the people whose job is to make money for the company”. Sandy Parakilas, who worked on the privacy side at Facebook, told the New York Times.
Now, there is a decent chance Cambridge Analytica’s didn’t actually do the much to elect Trump, the firm’s reputation in the political consulting community is less.
Conclusion.
50 million user accounts of Facebook had been breach, which means their information and identity has been exposed, for how long?no body can tell. We should take measure in the type of information we give out and those we entrust our information to.
