Facebook bug causes certain information leaks

I’ve just received this email from Facebook saying that my information was accidentally leaked due to bug which the Security Team detected last week.

facebookfail

Article from http://rt.com/news/facebook-email-phone-leak-109/

The bug – which revealed the private information of other Facebook users when someone downloaded their own personal data onto their hard drive had existed for more than a year, and was recently uncovered by the site’s White Hat Program which is an independent security experts who are rewarded with bonuses for detecting network vulnerabilities.

Facebook disabled the Download Your Information tool, through which the data was obtained, for 24 hours last week without warning to fix the issue, before acknowledging the existence of the bug on Friday evening.

“We currently have no evidence that this bug has been exploited maliciously and we have not received complaints from users or seen anomalous behavior on the tool or site to suggest wrongdoing,” Facebook reassured users on its blog.

While some users in the comments section underneath applauded the network for voluntarily admitting the existence of the design flaw, others said that they had contacted legal counsel, dissatisfied with a mere apology (Facebook sent an email informing those affected that their account had been compromised).

The company – which has more than 1.1 billion users – says that the vast majority of the numbers and emails was shared with no more than one other person.

Facebook is one of a number of leading US tech companies in the spotlight after security expert Edward Snowden leaked documents that showed that it is a part of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) PRISM program, which collects extensive personal data from millions.

But the social network denies that the NSA has direct access to its servers, and says that it provided US authorities with personal data from 18-19,000 individual accounts in the second half of last year, each time after a substantiated request.

The company has said that it protects its members’ data “aggressively”.

So my first initial question is why only now this bug was detected and second is how much of my data has fallen into the wrong hands since the period of the bug was thought to be one year. So I was want of the victims affected by this bug and I can only hope that Facebook would further upgrade and improve their IT infrastructure in order to prevent this incident from happening again. In my opinion, this is considered to the most weirdest, longest and serious bug affecting a major social networking site such as Facebook. My advice to all social networking sites, please check your site infrastructure to ensure this incident with Facebook will not repeat itself as this is considered to be the worst security breach. This will not only make users distrust Facebook but also encourages them to move over to another social networking site as they fear that their personal info is no longer kept safe. So that was considered one of the top news for this week so enjoy your weekend and I’ll see you guys on Monday. Also don’t forget to leave a comment below so that we can start a discussion with one another in order to explore everyone’s point of view  for this topic.

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