It looks like Facebook is going to get a hefty fine for the data breach earlier this week. Possibly the social network would have to pay a fine of $1.63 billion for the leak that may have hacked fifty million accounts.
Earlier this week Facebook reported that the accounts of up to fifty million people might have been hacked. This happened after attackers were able to find and use a vulnerability in the View as a function of the site. This allowed them to access and possibly take over users’ accounts.
Large fine
Last Friday Facebook logged out all users of the site and asked them to log in again. Passwords did not need to be changed. We take this very seriously, said Mark Zuckberberg, CEO of Facebook in a comment. I am glad that we found this, but it is problematic that this could have happened at all.
That is indeed problematic, in several ways. In recent times, Facebook has had more difficulties in protecting its users. The huge scandal of Cambridge Analytica did show that. But now the Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook can also get a hefty fine for today’s problems.
Within the rules of the EU GDPR Directive, a fine of up to 1.63 billion dollars could be imposed. The Irish Data Protection Commission has now requested more information from Facebook and states that it is concerned that this leak was discovered on Tuesday and affects millions of user accounts, but that Facebook is unable to explain precisely the origin of the leak and the risk to users.
A spokesman for the social network said that Facebook will participate in the research and that all questions will be answered. For the time being, it seems that Facebook was careless in the way in which account tokens were handled.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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