Facebook Security: Fodder for Testimony?

April 9, 2021

Who knows if this is true? “533 Million Facebook Users’ Phone Numbers Leaked on Hacker Forum.” The write up states:

The mobile phone numbers and other personal information for approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide has been leaked on a popular hacker forum for free. The stolen data first surfaced on a hacking community in June 2020 when a member began selling the Facebook data to other members.

If true, the revelation is a nice complement to a series of outstanding achievements by the centralized, big tech, really smart managers at super important companies. Examples include:

Twitter’s senior manager spoofing elected officials
Microsoft’s Exchange Server misstep when Windows Defender was on the job sort of
Amazon’s brilliant Twitter campaign about workers’ inexplicable need to take breaks
Google’s staunch defense of employees who grouse with assurances of continued employment.

Now Mr. Zuckerberg’s digital nation and its outstanding security.

How did this happen? The write up asserts:

According to Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, it is believed that threat actors exploited in 2019 a now-patched vulnerability in Facebook’s “Add Friend” feature that allowed them to gain access to member’s phone numbers.

I envision Mr. Zuckerberg answering this question under oath in an upcoming Congressional hearing:

Senator X: Mr. Zuckerberg, what the heck happened? I have a teen age grand daughter. Are you protecting her?

Mr. Zuckerberg: Senator, thank you for that question. At Facebook, we take every possible precaution to guard our user’s identify. I will look into this matter and provide a report written by an Amazon PR person whom we just hired, and assign the former head of Microsoft security also a new hire to investigate this matter. Early reports suggest that the 1,000 criminals attacking Microsoft were supplemented with an additional 2,000 bad actors to breach our highly secure system.

Plus, the loss of data affected a mere 533 million users. Trivial. It is old news too.

Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2021

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Facebook, News, Security

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.