Last weekend turned into a nightmare for Facebook users as their favorite social media platform officially disclosed that a cyber attack on its database could have leaked sensitive info of over 50 million users to hackers. As the investigation is still going on, the exact number of compromised accounts remains unclear and might be revealed by this weekend by the authorities.
Meanwhile, British data Watchdog has taken a review of the situation and is intending to impose a £1.25 billion fine on the world’s top social networking giant for showing laxity in keeping the data of its users secure.
In a recent conversation with a media resource, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner which mostly regulates the European Data Compliance said that the Facebook head needs to give a thorough explanation for what has happened and if he fails to do so, in either case, his company will have to face serious action.
As the global turnover for Facebook from the generated ads happens to be 31.2 billion last year, the imposed fine could be in the range of 10% to 20% of the total gross amount.
Facebook clarified in one of its latest cyber attack updates that hackers gained access to the account data through Facebook’s “View As” feature which allows users to see how their profiles look like when others view them.
Note 1- In March this year, Facebook was caught up in another data scandal which is linked to US Polls 2016. It’s said that a UK company named Cambridge Analytica falsely gathered public opinion from 86 million American Facebook users in 2015 and used that data to influence the results of 2016 US Presidential Polls which eventually went in favor of current 45th US President Donald Trump.
In other news related to the Facebook hack, Google made an announcement on Sunday that it will act swiftly to remove video tutorials on Youtube which show how to hack Facebook accounts. The web search giant has decided to scrap such videos within a period of a fortnight.
Note 2- Some videos which teach hackers on how to steal digital tokens will be the first to be blocked on Youtube, a video streaming service owned by Google.
