Early this month, social media giant Facebook (FB) was in news for failing to protect the data of its 533 million users from over 106 countries. Reacting to this data privacy development, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, shortly known as CERT, has asked the Mark Zuckerberg’s led company to issue an update on what the company was doing to prevent any data leaks in the future.
The agency that was devised to protect the information technology infrastructure in India is urging its populace using FB platform to strengthen their account privacy settings that will disallow them from falling prey to any data scrapping future incidents related to Facebook.
It is estimated that data of over 7 million Indian Facebook accounts were leaked in the incident that was brought to light early this year by a technology based website. And the exposed info includes email addresses, physical addresses of users, profile IDs, full names, job designations, phone numbers and birth dates.
CERT claims that the data leak took place when a hacker tried to exploit the platform by using a contact importer feature that generally allows users to find other FB users through their phone numbers.
FB issued an update on this note by stating that the contact importer feature was changed by its technical team in Sept’2019 as soon as it learnt that hackers were trying to exploit the platform.
Note- Incidentally the attack event was highlighted in the media just when the White House administration was discussing seriously on how to protect its public and private entities from any future state funded attacks such as the ‘SolarWinds Hack’ that was discovered in December 2020 by FireEye.
