Some personal information just doesn’t age – here’s what the Facebook data leak may mean for you
‘Half a billion Facebook users’ data breached’, this or something very similar is a headline you may have seen in the media in recent days. Any data breach, especially one that affects such a large quantity of users, is unpleasant both for the company and the users concerned; in this instance, though, it appears to be old news with a new twist.
The timeline of this data breach, according to Facebook, starts back in 2018, when it transpired that malicious actors were abusing a feature on Facebook that allowed a user to search for another user by phone number to locate them on the social network. This feature was especially useful in territories where many users share the same first and last name, making it complex to track down the actual person you were looking for. Unfortunately, this allowed bad actors to abuse the feature and ‘scrape’ Facebook using automation and scripts to compile a database that, at a minimum, included the victim’s name and phone number.
Facebook removed the feature in April 2018, shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and when the malicious ‘scraping’ activity was identified. Forward to 2019 and, as reported by TechCrunch, a security researcher found records of 400 million Facebook accounts in an unprotected database online. At the time, Facebook confirmed the data was dated and appeared to have been gathered prior to the removal of the search feature in 2018. The unprotected data was removed from public access.
In recent days, CNN and numerous o ..
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