Security News

The Social Network chalked up an easy win this week when a US court issued a default notice in its favor against Israeli spyware builder NSO group. Facebook filed suit back in 2019, alleging NSO developed code for exploits in acquired crypto chat app WhatsApp.

Facebook announced on Thursday that it has filed a lawsuit against domain registrar Namecheap and its Whoisguard privacy protection service over its refusal to provide information on a series of domains that impersonated the social media company and its services. Facebook says it regularly looks for domain names and apps that infringe its trademarks and it has come across 45 domains that impersonated Facebook and its services, and which leveraged Whoisguard to disguise the registrant's information.

On Tuesday, multiple reports suggested that Facebook has decided not to support its Libra virtual currency in its own products and will instead offer users the ability to make payments with government-issued currencies, or that the platform and its partners are weighing whether they should recast it as mostly a payments network that could operate with multiple coins. According to a report from The Information that cited three sources, Facebook has been mulling offering digital versions of currencies such as the US dollar and the euro, in addition to its proposed Libra token.

India: Facebook removed a network of 37 Facebook accounts, 32 Pages, 11 Groups and 42 Instagram accounts whose activity originated in India and which focused on the Gulf region, US, UK and Canada. Egypt: Facebook removed a network of 333 Facebook accounts, 195 Pages, 9 Groups and 1194 Instagram accounts.

GoodRx - a mobile app that saves US consumers money on prescription drugs - has apologized and sworn to do better after a Consumer Reports investigation found that it was sharing people's data with 20 other internet-based companies. On Friday, GoodRx said in a blog post that it has "Never and will never sell our users' personal health information." Having said that, the Consumer Reports story led the company to re-examine its policies when it comes to sharing data with third parties.

Despite Facebook claim, "Download Your Information" doesn't provide users with a list of all advertisers who uploaded a list with their personal data. As a user this means you can't exercise your rights under GDPR because you don't know which companies have uploaded data to Facebook.

Facebook is suing the data analytics firm OneAudience for allegedly developing a malicious, social-media-profile-grabbing software development kit and then paying app developers to embed it in their apps. According to the complaint, OneAudience's malicious SDK swiped the data that Facebook users had agreed to share with the app - data that may have included their name, email address, the country where they logged in from, time zone, Facebook ID, and, sometimes, gender.

Facebook on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against oneAudience data intelligence firm over a tactic it used to gather information about users of social media platforms. New Jersey-based oneAudience paid software makers to install "Malicious" software in their apps in order to "Improperly" collect data about people at Facebook and other social media sites, Facebook said.

As a result, thousands of events around the world are being canceled, postponed or turned into online-only events in the wake of the coronavirus and the looming threat of COVID-19. Shopify Unite 2020 developers conference was set for May 6-8 in Toronto and now the in-person portion is canceled and it will be an online-only event.

Facebook and Google this week announced the decision to postpone this year's BountyCon bug hunting conference due to health risks. "Out of an abundance of caution, we've decided to postpone BountyCon due to evolving public health risks related to coronavirus. While this was a difficult decision to make, our priority is the health and safety of our attendees," Facebook says.