Security News
Ireland's Data Protection Commission has levied fines of €265 million against Meta Platforms for failing to safeguard the personal data of more than half a billion users of its Facebook service, ramping up privacy enforcement against U.S. tech firms. The fines follow an inquiry initiated by the European regulator on April 14, 2021, close on the heels of a leak of a "Collated dataset of Facebook personal data that had been made available on the internet."
Ireland's Data Protection Commission has levied fines of €265 million against Meta Platforms for failing to safeguard the personal data of more than half a billion users of its Facebook service, ramping up privacy enforcement against U.S. tech firms. The fines follow an inquiry initiated by the European regulator on April 14, 2021, close on the heels of a leak of a "Collated dataset of Facebook personal data that had been made available on the internet."
Meta has been fined €265 million by the Irish data protection commission for a massive 2021 Facebook data leak exposing the information of hundreds of million users worldwide. Facebook at the time said threat actors collected the data by exploiting a flaw in its "Contact Importer" tool to associate phone numbers with a Facebook ID and then scraping the rest of the information to build a profile for the user.
Meta has removed several accounts on Facebook and Instagram associated with the U.S. military, saying they were used as part of covert influence operations targeting the Middle East and Russia. Meta says it removed 39 Facebook accounts, 26 Instagram accounts, 16 Facebook Pages, and two Facebook groups for violating its 'coordinated inauthentic behavior' policy.
A cybercriminal operation tracked as Ducktail has been hijacking Facebook Business accounts causing losses of up to $600,000 in advertising credits. The gang has been spotted before using malware to steal Facebook-related information and hijack associated business accounts to run their own ads that are paid for by the victim.
Meta Platforms on Tuesday said it took down a network of accounts and pages across Facebook and Instagram that were operated by people associated with the U.S. military to spread narratives that depicted the country in a favorable light in the Middle East and Central Asia. The social media giant stated the individuals behind the activity impersonated the communities they targeted, propagating content in Arabic, Farsi, and Russian that criticized Iran, China, and Russia, and floated themes of increased military cooperation with the U.S. These narratives spanned "Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's treatment of the Uyghur people, Iran's influence in the Middle East, and the support of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by Russia and China," Meta said in its Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report.
Meta Platforms is said to have fired or disciplined over two dozen employees and contractors over the past year for allegedly compromising and taking over user accounts, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Included among those fired were contractors who worked as security guards at the social media firm's facilities and were given access to an internal tool that allowed employees to help "Users they know" gain access to accounts after forgetting their passwords, or had their accounts locked out.
Following yesterday's deadly blast on İstiklal Avenue in Istanbul, Turkish authorities began restricting access to social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Telegram as a nationwide broadcast ban went into effect. Reports of a bomb blast taking place on Istanbul's busy İstiklal street began circulating on Sunday, November 13th on social media platforms.
Facebook appears to have silently rolled out a tool that allows users to remove their contact information, such as phone numbers and email addresses, uploaded by others. When users sync the contact lists on their devices with Facebook, it's worth pointing out the privacy violation, which stems from the fact that those contacts didn't explicitly consent to the upload. "Someone may have uploaded their address book to Facebook, Messenger or Instagram with your contact information in it," Facebook notes in the page.
A new Ducktail phishing campaign is spreading a never-before-seen Windows information-stealing malware written in PHP used to steal Facebook accounts, browser data, and cryptocurrency wallets. The malware targeted information stored in browsers, focusing on Facebook Business account data, and exfiltrated it to a private Telegram channel that acted as a C2 server.