Data of U.S.A’s Facebook Users Exposed

General Information for about 267 million facebook users which includes their name and contact information was available for access openly, as told by a cyber-security researcher, published in The Week Magazine.
The database from where the usage of Data of U.S.A’s Facebook Users Exposedwas taking place is supposed to be in Vietnam. This group appeared to be charging money to get access to data but due to a major technical glitch, the data base opened to all.

A representative from Facebook Inc. explained that the company is still going through the issue and it is expected that the solution to such a problem would soon be out. The major crisis was in the updation of data privacy policy which leads to faulty execution resulting in such a big problem. None was aware of the access of data to the Vietnamese group. Diachenko partnered with Comparitech, a website that seeks to help consumers research and compare tech services, to uncover the exposed data.

Out of all the affected users, 99% came out to be from one geography i.e., US and other 1% from Vietnam. It was a clear assumption that the group which gave access to such an information was from Vietnam because of high usage of language and the type and structure of data which was used for selling was as per their preferences. It is now resembling that the other data breaches are also conducted by Vietnamese hackers. The information exposed and investigated is not giving a clear picture towards hacking system and also, explains that the data of such type is specifically used for sophisticated spam or attacks. “This is pretty significant because you can start getting a full profile of a person,” Diachenko said of the data. He also spoke about his conversation with internet service providers hosting the database that it was removed on the other day.

He also shared with the sources that the hacker was able to download the database two days prior to his notice and could have possibly shared it with the online burgles. His first witness for this case was a US based news website who were constantly aware about ongoing discoveries of unsecured databases for about a year. The update has been shared by Business Week Magazine, you can also get it subscribed to read more on the subject. The magazine has been running since 1929 providing its subscribers with right and timely information.

The researcher then underwent a project where he tried to use the contact information from the database including the contact numbers which were answered from the real facebook users to claim its authenticity. It has been evidently proved that the data was collected illegally and the doubts were certain on Vietnam groups who must have pulled it out from facebook pages by gaining false authorization. Scarping such data by this means is done by bots and to not highlight themselves they tried extracting details of Vietnamese people too.

Diachenko denial his interest of sharing data with outsiders. In one of his statement, he said, the social network was under investigation and the data obtained from facebook was extracted by using unspecified data protection measures in the recent years.

In the year 2018, the media giant restricted its users from searching one another via phone number following the revelations that the political firm Cambridge Analytica had already accessed the information for about 87 million users without their consent.

Diachenko said that he is not determined as to when was the data collected. He could found through digital footprints that the records exclaimed time stamps from January to June 2019 but was unsure as to would have done that.
The security officers said that the users who were affected with this spam were at a risk of losing their privacy and could have been under severe identity theft attempts. The information can be cross referenced with physical and email addresses and other data obtained with data breaches which includes the user’s unique ID associated with their accounts.

In September, the site TechCrunch reported that one of the online researcher exposed the data of 400 million facebook users which created a high risk of identification threat among the users.

In the time span of 6 months, facebook revealed that there were millions of passwords which weren’t encrypted and was exposed in a readable form to its employees on internet servers and that practice has been in continuation for years or so.