Facebook is in the news again, for another data breach: A cyber security firm, UpGuard has said in a report that over 540 million records about Facebook users were publicly exposed on Amazon’s cloud computing service recently.
UpGuard claimed that Cultura Colectiva, a Mexico-based media company, was responsible for the leak. It said that the company exposed 146 gigabytes of Facebook user data, including account names, IDs and details about comments and reactions to posts. It still remains unclear how many individual users this has affected.
Commenting on this breach, Renaud Deraison, Co-founder and CTO of Tenable, said: “Seems like every other week a security issue is discovered in the Facebook ecosystem.
Facebook is giving third-party app developers access to user data. That means the company’s massive trove of data is in the hands of potentially thousands of third parties all over the world. App developers are focused mainly on bringing new offerings to market quickly — it’s what consumers have come to expect. It looks like Facebook doesn’t have enforced guidelines when it comes to how its partners handle cybersecurity.”
“As long as cybersecurity remains an afterthought in the digital economy, we’ll continue to see these kinds of easily preventable data leaks,” he added.
The last year has been a rough one for Facebook, where it has had to face federal criminal investigation for deals with electronics manufacturers to access user data, and was hit by a series of security breaches.
