Facebook’s woes, as far as security and user privacy are concerned, continue to grow. According to a new report, the social network has been revealed to have exposed millions of private records on Amazon servers.
Bloomberg has the story this week, outlining the latest security issue from Facebook. A cybersecurity firm, UpGuard, discovered the issue, which states that Facebook inadvertently uploaded millions of private records from Facebook users into Amazon servers. The problem is that those servers are publicly accessible, which meant the previously private information was suddenly quite public.
In this particular case, it comes down to third-party databases. The security firm was able to show that Cultura Colectiva openly stored 540 million Facebook records on the public servers. Facebook, for its part, did shut down the database after it was notified of the security issue by the publication reporting on the story.
One of the public databases included “names, passwords and email addresses” of Facebook users, as many as 22,000. If that isn’t enough, UpGuard also discovered that there are still 100,000 public Amazon-hosted databases out there in the wild, so it’s possible that, even beyond Facebook’s slip up here, that there is even more publicly-available information out there.
As a quick refresher, Facebook’s security woes are coming in semi-frequently now. Most recently it was reported that the social network stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords in plain text.
Our Take
These are security elements that Facebook seriously has to get a handle on. Because these situations keep popping up, some worse than others, but all incredibly bad.
We Want To Hear From You
If you haven’t already deleted your Facebook account, is this one more incident that might convince you to do so?
[via Bloomberg]
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