Cambridge Analytica | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a long-running class-action lawsuit filed in 2018. The legal dispute sprang up in response to revelations that the social media giant allowed third-party apps such as those used by Cambridge Analytica to access users' personal information without their consent for political advertising. The proposed settlement, first  reported  by Reuters last week, is the latest penalty paid by the company in the wake of a  number  of  privacy   mishaps   through the years . It still requires the approval of a federal judge in the San Francisco division of the U.S. District Court. It's worth noting that Facebook previously sought to  dismiss the lawsuit  in September 2019,  claiming  users have no legitimate privacy interest in any information they make available to their friends on social media. The  data harvesting scandal ...

After months of negotiations, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has approved a record $5 billion settlement with Facebook over its privacy investigation into the Cambridge Analytica scandal . The settlement will put an end to a wide-ranging probe that began more than a year ago and centers around the violation of a 2011 agreement Facebook made with the FTC that required Facebook to gain explicit consent from users to share their personal data. The FTC launched an investigation into the social media giant last year after it was revealed that the company allowed Cambridge Analytica access to the personal data of around  87 million Facebook users without their explicit consent. Now, according to a new report published by the Wall Street Journal, the FTC commissioners this week finally voted to approve a $5 billion settlement, with three Republicans voting to approve the deal and two Democrats against it. Facebook anticipated the fine to between $3 billion...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Facebook expects to face a massive fine of up to $5 billion from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as the result of an investigation into its privacy policies—that's about one month's revenue for the social media giant. To be clear the amount of fine is not what the FTC has announced or hinted yet; instead, it's an estimated due that Facebook disclosed on Wednesday in its first quarter 2019 financial earnings report. In its earnings report, Facebook said the company had set $3 billion aside in anticipation of the settlement with the FTC, who launched a probe into Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal . The probe centers around the violation of a 2011 agreement Facebook made with the FTC that required the social media to gain explicit consent from users to share their data. The FTC launched an investigation into Facebook last year after it was revealed that the company allowed Cambridge Analytica access to the personal data of around 50 million Face...

Facebook has finally been slapped with its first fine of £500,000 for allowing political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly gather and misuse data of 87 million users . The fine has been imposed by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office ( ICO ) and was calculated using the UK's old Data Protection Act 1998 which can levy a maximum penalty of £500,000 — ironically that's equals to the amount Facebook earns every 18 minutes. The news does not come as a surprise as the U.K.'s data privacy watchdog already notified the social network giant in July this year that the commission was intended to issue the maximum fine. For those unaware, Facebook has been under scrutiny since earlier this year when it was revealed that the personal data of 87 million users was improperly gathered and misused by political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica , who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. The ICO, who launched an investigation...

Facebook has been fined £500,000 ($664,000) in the U.K. after the country's data protection watchdog concluded that its data-sharing scandal broke the law, making it as the social network's first fine over the Cambridge Analytica scandal . Yes, £500,000—that's the maximum fine allowed by the UK's Data Protection Act 1998, and equals to what Facebook earns every 8 minutes. Facebook has been under scrutiny since earlier this year when it was revealed that personal data of 87 million users was improperly gathered and misused by political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. According to the social media giant, a Cambridge University lecturer named Aleksandr Kogan collected the users' data legitimately through a quiz app but then violated its terms by sharing the data with Cambridge Analytica, which was then hired by the Trump presidential campaign. The UK's Information Commissioner's...

People are still getting over the most controversial data scandal of the year, i.e., Cambridge Analytica scandal , and Facebook is under fire yet again after it emerges that a popular quiz app on the social media platform exposed the private data of up to 120 million users for years. Facebook was in controversies earlier this year over a quiz app that sold data of 87 million users to a political consultancy firm, who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. Now, a different third-party quiz app, called NameTests, found exposing data of up to 120 million Facebook users to anyone who happened to find it, an ethical hacker revealed. NameTests[.]com, the website behind popular social quizzes, like "Which Disney Princess Are You?" that has around 120 million monthly users, uses Facebook's app platform to offer a fast way to sign up. Just like any other Facebook app, signing up on the NameTests website using their app allows the company to fetch neces...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress this week to explain how his company collects and handles users' personal information. The past few weeks have been difficult for Facebook over concerns that the data of millions of users has been breached. Facebook stores details of almost every action you have taken and interaction you have engaged in on its platform. What many Facebook users are unaware of, though, is that you can easily download and see all the information Facebook has collected from you in just a few minutes. Here's how to find out what data Facebook has collected over time, including all your past posts, messages, photos, videos and more. Here's how to Download Your Facebook Data: First, sign into Facebook (on a desktop browser, not your mobile). Then, click the drop-down arrow on the top right, and click on "Settings." This will take you to facebook.com/settings, where you will find your "General Account Set...

Facebook dropped another bombshell on its users by admitting that all of its 2.2 billion users should assume malicious third-party scrapers have compromised their public profile information. On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that "malicious actors" took advantage of "Search" tools on its platform to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide. The revelation once again underlines the failure of the social-media giant to protect users' privacy while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the same information. The revelation came weeks after the disclosure of the Cambridge Analytica scandal , wherein personal data of 77 million users was improperly gathered and misused by the political consultancy firm, who reportedly also helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. However, the latest scam revealed by the social media giant about the abuse of Facebook's search tools over the...

Facebook knows a lot about you, your likes and dislikes—it's no surprise. But do you know, if you have installed Facebook Messenger app on your Android device, there are chances that the company had been collecting your contacts, SMS, and call history data at least until late last year. A tweet from Dylan McKay, a New Zealand-based programmer, which received more than 38,000 retweets (at the time of writing), showed how he found his year-old data—including complete logs of incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages—in an archive he downloaded (as a ZIP file) from Facebook. Facebook was collecting this data on its users from last few years, which was even reported earlier in media, but the story did not get much attention at that time. Since Facebook had been embroiled into controversies over its data sharing practices after the Cambridge Analytica scandal last week, tweets from McKay went viral and has now fueled the never-ending privacy debate. A Facebook spokespe...

Top Story— Facebook has just lost over $60 billion in market value over the past two days—that's more than Tesla's entire market capitalisation and almost three times that of Snapchat. Facebook shares plunge over revelations that personal data of 50 million users was obtained and misused by British data analytics firm ' Cambridge Analytica ,' who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. The privacy scandal that rocked the social media giant was revealed earlier this week when Chris Wylie , the 28-year-old data scientist who worked with a Cambridge University academic, turned into a whistleblower and leaked to the newspapers how poorly Facebook handles people's private information. Wylie claims Cambridge Analytica created " Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindf**k tool " that profiles citizens to predict their voting patterns based on the personal information gathered from a variety of sources and then helps political ...