Although most of the American Technology companies claim that they stay extremely cautious while handling and storing their user data, all these statements seem to remain true in words and not in practice.
The best example is here, where Facebook(FB) has released a press statement last Friday claiming that banking info of more than 29K employees was compromised after the data stored on some hard drives got stolen from a car owned by a Facebook employee.
Therefore this callousness clearly shows how serious are the companies when they are handling user data.
Going deep into the details, the facts are as follows- On November 17th, 2019 a FB employee was allowed to carry hard drives in his/her car and news is out that the drives carried sensitive info of employees which included banking details, bonuses, employee names, the last 4 digits of their social security numbers, salaries and equity details.
And a thief who might have known what the drives were holding siphoned of those data storage mediums without the knowledge of the employee.
What’s amazing in this whole activity is that the employee learnt about the hard drives theft only on November 20th,2019 and the social media giant realized about the data theft only on November 26th this year.
Note 1- According to a report published in Bloomberg, the employee from whose car the hard drives were stolen happened to work in the Payroll’s department of Facebook and the Mark Zuckerberg’s company admitted that the employee deed was a clear cut breach of the company protocol when it comes to data access and storage.
Note 2- Though this news piece doesn’t have to do anything with Cybersecurity, it clearly states how cautious FB happens to be when it comes to handling of user data, considering the ongoing investigation on Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
Note 3- FB has sent an internal email to its employees about the data theft only on Saturday last week, even though the cyber incident took place a fortnight ago.
