New Delhi: According to a BBC News report, hackers appear to have compromised and published private messages from at least 81,000 Facebook users’ accounts. The hackers told the BBC Russian Service that they had details from a total of 120 million accounts, which they were attempting to sell.
Facebook maintains that its security has not been compromised and that the data in question had probably been obtained through malicious browser extensions. Facebook also added that it had taken steps to prevent further accounts being affected.
According to the BBC, many of the users whose details have been compromised are based in Ukraine, Russia, the UK, US, Brazil and elsewhere. The hackers have offered to sell access to the data for 10 cents (8p) per account. However, their advert has since been taken offline.
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Facebook’s data breaches and its inability to curb the rise of misinformation on its platform, have put the tech giant under growing public and government scrutiny.
Earlier this year, Facebook was embroiled in a scandal after it was revealed that a London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters that were later used to help elect US President Donald Trump in 2016. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the social network planned to conduct an investigation of thousands of apps that have used Facebook‘s platform, restrict developer access to data, and give members a tool that lets them disable access to their Facebook data more easily.
In September 2018, Facebook faced another security breach that affected almost 50 million users on its platform. Facebook claimed it had fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement. The breach forced millions of Facebook’s users across the globe to log out of their accounts as the company “reset the access tokens of the almost 50 million accounts that were affected to protect their security.”
Last month in October, cyber attackers stole data from 29 million Facebook accounts using an automated programme that moved from one friend to the next. Facebook said its largest-ever data theft hit fewer than 50 million profiles. The attackers took profile details such as birth dates, employers, education history, religious preference, types of devices used, pages followed and recent searches and location check-ins from 14 million users.
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The breach left users more vulnerable to targeted phishing attacks and created unease about posting to a service whose privacy, moderation and security practices have been called into question by a series of scandals.
Lawmakers and investors have grown more concerned that Facebook is not doing enough to safeguard data.