UpGuard cybersecurity experts detected that Facebook user data, collected by third-party developers, was located on the Amazon cloud-based server and was publicly available.
The storage contained two archives. The bigger one, 146 GB, was related to the Mexican media company Cultura Colectiva, including over 540 million data records about the FB users activity, their names, and account IDs. The second part of the significant discovery belongs to the At the Pool app, with 22 thousand account data and Facebook passwords in total.
However, the most burning question is how long this archive remained unencrypted and how many data could be used by hackers. UpGuard also stated that, in a while, after the FB team was informed about the leak, those arrays of records were deleted.
The Facebook representative emphasized that according to the rules and standards of their company, no data can be gathered and kept in the open-access bases. That is why they got in touch with Amazon to delete all files that could be potentially revealed.
Users’ data got into trouble accidentally because Amazon uses unpassworded servers, which is indignant a priori. So this time confidential info of customers wasn’t stolen or hacked as usually. But this story brings up a problem of data protection imperfectness, which causes a lot of consequences. Earlier before there was a scandalous case with Cambridge Analytica, so Facebook took steps to submit the system defects, but the problem is still here. Probably the massive scale of the FB database requires some innovative approach for handling the millions of accounts and their components.
