Security News
The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés, France's data protection watchdog, has slapped Facebook and Google with fines of €150 million and €60 million for violating E.U. privacy rules by failing to provide users with an easy option to reject cookie tracking technology. HTTP cookies are small pieces of data created while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web browser to track online activity across the web and store information about the browsing sessions, including logins and details entered in form fields such as names and addresses.
France's National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, the country's data privacy and protection body, has announced a 60 million euro sanction against Facebook and a 150 million euro penalty against Google. As a result, today CNIL announced an administrative fine of 60 million Euros against Facebook Ireland Ltd. and an additional 100,000 Euros per day of delay of compliance, starting from March 2022.
Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms on Monday said it has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. state of California against bad actors who operated more than 39,000 phishing websites that impersonated its digital properties to mislead unsuspecting users into divulging their login credentials. The attacks were carried out using a relay service, Ngrok, that redirected internet traffic to the phishing websites in a manner that concealed the true location of the fraudulent infrastructure.
Meta has filed a federal lawsuit in California court to disrupt phishing attacks targeting Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp users. The attackers behind these phishing campaigns used almost 40,000 phishing pages that would impersonate the four platforms' login pages.
Meta Platforms on Thursday revealed it took steps to deplatform seven cyber mercenaries that it said carried out "Indiscriminate" targeting of journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, families of opposition, and human rights activists located in over 100 countries, amid mounting scrutiny of surveillance technologies. To that end, the company said it alerted 50,000 users of Facebook and Instagram that their accounts were spied on by the companies, who offer a variety of services that run the spyware gamut from hacking tools for infiltrating mobile phones to creating fake social media accounts to monitor targets.
The spyware industry spreads far beyond the infamous Israeli spyware company NSO Group, Meta said, it being "Only one piece of a much broader global cyber-mercenary ecosystem." Facebook sued NSO Group, maker of the notorious, industrial-grade spyware Pegasus, in 2019 over an alleged attack that exploited a zero-day vulnerability in WhatsApp's messaging platform to inject spyware onto victims' phones in targeted campaigns. The Israeli firm markets spyware that Meta's report said has been used in "Frequent targeting of activists, opposition politicians and government officials in Hong Kong and Mexico." Its clients reportedly include the Department of Homeland Security, the Internal Revenue Service, and Saudi Arabia.
Facebook successor Meta on Thursday said it canceled 1,500 social media accounts used by seven surveillance-for-hire firms to conduct online attacks against government critics and members of civil society. These accounts were primarily used to observe targets and lure them into visiting malicious websites, or receiving booby-trapped messages, typically, that compromise their devices and online profiles.
Facebook has disrupted the operations of seven different spyware-making companies, blocking their Internet infrastructure, sending cease and desist letters, and banning them from its platform. "As a result of our months-long investigation, we took action against seven different surveillance-for-hire entities to disrupt their ability to use their digital infrastructure to abuse social media platforms and enable surveillance of people across the internet," said Director of Threat Disruption David Agranovich and Head of Cyber Espionage Investigations Mike Dvilyanski.
Meta has expanded its bug bounty program to include payouts for reports of scraping attacks on Facebook - but hold your applause. "We're tackling the industry-wide issue of scraping by expanding our bug bounty program to reward valid reports of scraping bugs and unprotected data sets," states an update from the Facebook security team.
Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, has announced that it's expanding its bug bounty program to start rewarding valid reports of scraping vulnerabilities across its platforms as well as include reports of scraping data sets that are available online. To that end, the social media giant aims to monetarily compensate for valid reports of scraping bugs in its service and identify unprotected or openly public databases containing no less than 100,000 unique Facebook user records with personally identifiable information such as email, phone number, physical address, religious, or political affiliation.