Facebook’s Massive Data Leak

Facebook is many people’s favorite—or at least most used—app and it does bring value to people by letting them keep tabs on friends and family, or grow their businesses. It has grown to be one of the largest, most successful software technology companies in the world. Unfortunately, with that type of exposure comes the responsibility of securing massive amounts of personal data. In this quest, they leave a lot to be decided. Today, we take a look at the situation Facebook is in as they are dealing with one of the largest data leaks in history.

What’s the Issue?

The current situation didn’t start recently, but at the beginning of April, some 533 million Facebook records were leaked by hackers for free on the dark web. Over half a billion users have had their personal information, including Facebook ID, corresponding phone numbers, birthdates, some email addresses, relationship status, and bio, dumped into a public database online. 

Facebook confirmed that the data was from a 2019 data leak, and that they have long since patched the vulnerability used to obtain it. That’s a good thing, but it’s still concerning that two years after a major data leak, the data, which was for sale for the past two years, was just dropped on the web for free. Obviously, the tech giant wants the narrative to be that this is old data and they have since made the changes necessary to protect their massive amount of user data, but the fact that it is still available is the bigger issue.

Once Data is Leaked, It’s Out There Forever

We may not really know the tangible value of the data found in this massive database. What we do know is that once data is leaked, it’s going to cause some consternation for Facebook, because:

• One of Facebook’s major revenue streams revolves around transactions with this data.
• This data is out there for free.
• It was likely obtained from a hacking tactic called scraping.

Your company doesn’t have the huge amount of data that Facebook has, but you have the same responsibilities with the sensitive data you have. If Facebook wasn’t, you know, Facebook (that being a platform that is typically used to share data) they wouldn’t be able to simply shrug off something like this. We can say with confidence that a data leak of nearly a quarter of your client base’s data would come with massive repercussions for your business. 

That’s why you need to ensure that you have the tools in place so that you don’t have to deal with data theft, loss of customer confidence, and all the other negative variables that come with a data breach. If you would like to find out more about how Techworks Consulting, Inc. can help you secure your business’ and customers’ data, reach out to us today at (631) 285-1527.