If you’re using Facebook nowadays (and who doesn’t?) you may be wondering just how safe your personal data is right now. Sorry to give you the Grinch Report, but the latest news from Facebook is that their latest privacy debacle involves around 267 customers. Security researchers recently discovered a niche in the FB platform where user information was publicly exposed for nearly a month for anyone who wanted to pick it up. Once notified, Facebook plugged the hole right away, but estimates are that millions of user’s private links were placed on forums for hackers before the breach was closed. Despite this data privacy catastrophe, Facebook is still intent on creating its very own system of operation so it doesn’t need Android OS anymore as an open source.
The data breach occurred on FB affiliate Elasticsearch, which is a full-text distributed search engine platform.
Authorities say that while passwords and PINs were not compromised, many other private bits of information were, such as timestamps, phone numbers, full legal names, and Facebook ID icons. The information thus garnered by a black hat hacker would make SMS scams a breeze to pull on Facebook users anyplace in the world, and there are reports that some phishing scams related directly to this particular security breach have already started to turn up in parts of North America.
