Security News
Facebook has sued a Ukrainian national for allegedly harvesting and selling personal data describing 178 million of the Social NetworkTM's users - actions it says violates the service's terms of service. The suit alleges that Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko created millions of virtual Android devices, each with a different phone number, and used them to deliver automated requests to Facebook systems using the Messenger app.
The official Facebook page of a destroyer-class Navy warship, the USS Kidd, has gone rogue: Someone has taken over the page in order tostream Age of Empires play. The hijacked page of the warship, which finished up its latest active deployment in late September, then posted a joyful "Hahahahaha" and commenced four hours of live Age of Empires action.
An outage affected all of its sites, testimony from a whistleblower this week could put the company back in the legal hotseat, and now it's come out that private and personal data from more than 1.5 billion Facebook users was found for sale on a hacker forum. Reported by privacy research company Privacy Affairs, the data found for sale doesn't indicate that the seller actually broke into Facebook's systems, nor that its data tied to any other data breach.
This comes after competitors like Signal and Telegram shared info on a massive exodus of Facebook users joining or switching to other platforms following the 6-hour-long downtime that impacted Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Signal and Telegram also began experiencing in the wake of Facebook's global outage after millions of Facebook users were joining their platforms.
Matrix-based communications and collaboration app Element has continued its mission to make bridges into the decentralised network a little more commercially acceptable with connectivity for Signal. Amandine Le Pape, co-founder of Element, had already given WhatsApp a jab with the privacy blade the last time we spoke and Element's CEO, Matthew Hodgson, joined the party during our chat about the Signal bridge.
As of Monday night, Facebook had crawled back from what may have been its longest blackout ever and apologized for the mass outage that left billions of users locked out of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus VR for about six hours. When it comes to gauging Facebook's worst blackout ever, accounts vary: CNBC reported that Monday's outage was the longest downtime that Facebook has experienced since 2008, when a bug knocked its site offline for about a day, affecting some 80 million users.
Facebook says that yesterday's worldwide outage was caused by faulty configuration changes made to its backbone routers that brought all its services to a halt. "Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication," said Santosh Janardhan, VP for Engineering and Infrastructure at Facebook.
Facebook - along with Instagram and WhatsApp - went down globally today. At approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today, someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company's Border Gateway Protocol records.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are starting to come back online after a BGP routing issue caused an over five-hour worldwide outage. As explained by Giorgio Bonfiglio, a Principal TAM at Amazon AWS, various Facebook routing prefixes had suddenly disappeared from the Internet's BGP routing tables, effectively making it impossible to connect to any services hosted on their IP addresses.
As of Monday afternoon, Facebook had been flat on its face for hours, suffering a simultaneous worldwide outage not only on its main site, but also at its Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus VR subsidiaries. The New York Times reported that Facebook's internal communications platform, Workplace, was also dragged offline, "Leaving most employees unable to do their jobs." It's been a thumb-twiddling afternoon, the Times reported, with two Facebook employees comparing it to a "Snow day."