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New York, Canada, Ireland Launch New Investigations Into Facebook Privacy Breaches

New York, Canada, Ireland Launch New Investigations Into Facebook Privacy Breaches
Apr 27, 2019
Facebook has a lot of problems, then there are a lot of problems for Facebook—and both are not going to end anytime sooner. Though Facebook has already set aside $5 billion from its revenue to cover a possible fine the company is expecting as a result of an FTC investigation over privacy violations, it seems to be just first installment of what Facebook has to pay for continuously ignoring users' privacy. This week, Facebook has been hit with three new separate investigations from various governmental authorities—both in the United States and abroad—over the company's mishandling of its users' data . New York Attorney General to Investigate Facebook Email Collection Scandal New York Attorney General is opening an investigation into Facebook's unauthorized collection of the email contacts of more than 1.5 million users during site registration without their permission. Earlier this month, Facebook was caught practicing the worst ever user-verification mechanism

Facebook Stored Millions of Instagram Users' Passwords in Plaintext

Facebook Stored Millions of Instagram Users' Passwords in Plaintext
Apr 18, 2019
Facebook late last month revealed that the social media company mistakenly stored passwords for "hundreds of millions" of Facebook users in plaintext, including "tens of thousands" passwords of its Instagram users as well. Now it appears that the incident is far worse than first reported. Facebook today quietly updated its March press release, adding that the actual number of affected Instagram users were not in hundreds of thousands but millions. These plaintext passwords for millions of Instagram users, along with millions of Facebook users, were accessible to some of the Facebook engineers, who according to the company, did not abuse it. According to the updated post, Facebook discovered "additional logs of Instagram passwords" stored in a readable format, but added that its investigation revealed that the stored passwords were never "abused or improperly accessed" by any of its employees. Here's the full updated statement p

How to Find and Fix Risky Sharing in Google Drive

How to Find and Fix Risky Sharing in Google Drive
Mar 06, 2024Data Security / Cloud Security
Every Google Workspace administrator knows how quickly Google Drive becomes a messy sprawl of loosely shared confidential information. This isn't anyone's fault; it's inevitable as your productivity suite is purposefully designed to enable real-time collaboration – both internally and externally.  For Security & Risk Management teams, the untenable risk of any Google Drive footprint lies in the toxic combinations of sensitive data, excessive permissions, and improper sharing. However, it can be challenging to differentiate between typical business practices and potential risks without fully understanding the context and intent.  Material Security, a company renowned for its innovative method of protecting sensitive data within employee mailboxes, has recently launched  Data Protection for Google Drive  to safeguard the sprawl of confidential information scattered throughout Google Drive with a powerful discovery and remediation toolkit. How Material Security helps organ

Another Facebook Bug Could Have Exposed Your Private Information

Another Facebook Bug Could Have Exposed Your Private Information
Nov 13, 2018
Another security vulnerability has been reported in Facebook that could have allowed attackers to obtain certain personal information about users and their friends, potentially putting the privacy of users of the world's most popular social network at risk. Discovered by cybersecurity researchers from Imperva, the vulnerability resides in the way Facebook search feature displays results for entered queries. According to Imperva researcher Ron Masas, the page that displays search results includes iFrame elements associated with each outcome, where the endpoint URLs of those iFrames did not have any protection mechanisms in place to protect against cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. It should be noted that the newly reported vulnerability has already been patched, and unlike previously disclosed flaw in Facebook that exposed personal information of 30 million users , it did not allow attackers to extract information from mass accounts at once. How Does the Facebo

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Researcher finds a way to Delete and Modify Facebook Messages Sent to Other Users

Researcher finds a way to Delete and Modify Facebook Messages Sent to Other Users
Jun 07, 2016
Sometimes I receive emails from our readers who wanted to know how to hack Facebook account , but just to delete some of their messages they have sent to their friends or colleagues mistakenly or under wrong circumstances like aggression. How to hack a Facebook account? It is probably the biggest "n00b" question you will see on the Internet. The solution for this query is hard to find — but recently researchers have shown that how you can modify or alter your messages once you have pressed the SEND button in Facebook Messenger. According to the researcher  Roman Zaikin  from cyber security firm Check Point , a simple HTML tweak can be used to exploit Facebook online chat as well as its Messenger app, potentially allowing anyone to modify or delete any of his/her sent message, photo, file, and link. Though the bug is simple, it could be exploited by malicious users to send a legitimate link in a Facebook chat or group chat, and later change it to a malicious link t

Facebook's latest feature Alerts You if Someone Impersonates Your Profile

Facebook's latest feature Alerts You if Someone Impersonates Your Profile
Mar 26, 2016
Online harassment has been elevated a step with the advent of popular social networks like Facebook. Cyber stalkers create fake profiles impersonating other Facebook users and start doing activities on their behalf until and unless the owners notice the fake profiles and manually report it to Facebook. Even in some cases, cyber stalkers block the Facebook account holders whom they impersonate in order to carry out mischievous tasks through fake profiles without being detected by the actual account holders. But now, online criminals can no longer fool anyone with impersonation method, as Facebook is currently working on a feature that automatically informs its 1.6 Billion user base about the cloned accounts. If the company detects a duplicate Facebook account of a user, it will automatically send an alert to the original account holder, who'll be prompted to identify if the profile in question is indeed a fake profile impersonating you or if it actually belongs t

Facebook adds Built-in Tor Support for its Android App

Facebook adds Built-in Tor Support for its Android App
Jan 19, 2016
Rejoice for Privacy Lovers! Facebook today took a surprising move by announcing that it is bringing the free anonymizing software TOR support to its Android app , almost two years after the social network planned to make Facebook available directly over Tor network. Yes. Believe it or not, the Android version of the popular Facebook application now supports the Tor anonymity network. In October 2014, Facebook launched a .onion website on TOR in order to let its users around the world access its service more securely. Access Facebook over TOR via Orbot This latest move to expand that access to the Android app opens up the option to millions more users to maintain their privacy when they visit the world's most popular social network. Facebook says "a sizeable community of people" are already accessing the site over TOR, so the company is bringing this feature to Android via the free Orbot proxy app , which is available on the Google's Play

You Can Now Use Messenger App without a Facebook Account

You Can Now Use Messenger App without a Facebook Account
Jun 26, 2015
Don't have Facebook account but want to use its Messenger service? Then go for it because Mark Zuckerberg wants even the people who hate Facebook to use the social network's separate Messenger service . So, you no longer need an active Facebook account to make use of the Messenger service, all you need is just your name and phone number, the company announced today. Facebook is giving a new " Not On Facebook? " option on the sign-up screen for its messaging app, which allows anyone to create an account for the Messenger app using his or her first name and phone number. Facebook to offer Messenger to people without Facebook account Facebook currently started offering this option for people in the United States, Canada, Peru, and Venezuela; the rest have to wait for the feature. Users with non-Facebook accounts will enjoy the same Messenger features, including voice and video calls, payments, stickers and GIFs. The only and major differenc

New Facebook feature Encourages users to use PGP for Encrypted Communications

New Facebook feature Encourages users to use PGP for Encrypted Communications
Jun 01, 2015
In this era of Global surveillance, we all are worried about the privacy of our communication and sensitive data. There is no guarantee that our data is not being snooped on, but there is a solution — PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is more than 20 years old technology but is yet not widely adopted. PGP is an open source end-to-end encryption standard to encrypt e-mails, protecting you against companies, governments, or criminals spying on your Internet connection. But... ...the tool is too complicated for most of the people to implement and use. However, Facebook is now encouraging its users to use PGP and communicate by sending encrypted emails, adding the popular OpenPGP email encryption standard as an extra layer of security for the cautious. According to the latest announcement , you can now upload your Public PGP key to your Facebook profile so that anyone with your public key can send you encrypted emails. By giving such option to
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