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Facebook on Tuesday revealed it filed two separate legal actions against perpetrators who abused its ad platform to run deceptive advertisements in violation of the company's  Terms  and  Advertising Policies .  "In the first case, the defendants are a California marketing company and its agents responsible for a  bait-and-switch  advertising scheme on Facebook," the social media giant's Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation, Jessica Romero,  said . "In the second case, the defendants are a group of individuals located in Vietnam who got users to self-compromise their Facebook accounts and ran millions of dollars of unauthorized ads." As part of the fraudulent activity, the marketing company, N&J USA Incorporated, promoted the sale of merchandise such as clothing, watches, and toys through misleading ads that, when clicked, redirected users to other e-commerce websites to complete the purchase, only to either receive nothing or get deliver

Instagram has patched a new flaw that allowed anyone to view archived posts and stories posted by private accounts without having to follow them. "This bug could have allowed a malicious user to view targeted media on Instagram," security researcher Mayur Fartade  said  in a Medium post today. "An attacker could have been able to see details of private/archived posts, stories, reels, IGTV without following the user using Media ID." Fartade disclosed the issue to Facebook's security team on April 16, 2021, following which the shortcoming was patched on June 15. He was also awarded $30,000 as part of the company's bug bounty program. Although the attack requires knowing the media ID associated with an image, video, or album, by brute-forcing the identifiers, Fartade demonstrated that it was possible to craft a POST request to a GraphQL endpoint and retrieve sensitive data. As a consequence of the flaw, details such as like/comment/save count, display_

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WhatsApp on Friday disclosed that it won't deactivate accounts of users who don't accept its  new privacy policy  rolling out on May 15, adding it will continue to keep reminding them to accept the new terms. "No one will have their accounts deleted or lose functionality of WhatsApp on May 15 because of this update," the Facebook-owned messaging service  said  in a statement. The move marks a turnaround from its previous stance earlier this year when the company outlined plans to make the accounts completely inaccessible should users choose not to comply with the data-sharing agreement and opt not to have their WhatsApp account information shared with Facebook. "If you haven't accepted by [May 15], WhatsApp will not delete your account. However, you won't have full functionality of WhatsApp until you accept," the company had  previously said . "For a short time, you'll be able to receive calls and notifications, but won't be able to

Facebook on Wednesday said it took steps to dismantle malicious activities perpetrated by two state-sponsored hacking groups operating out of Palestine that abused its platform to distribute malware. The social media giant attributed the attacks to a network connected to the Preventive Security Service ( PSS ), the security apparatus of the State of Palestine, and another threat actor known as Arid Viper (aka Desert Falcon and APT-C-23), the latter of which is alleged to be connected to the cyber arm of Hamas. The two digital espionage campaigns, active in 2019 and 2020, exploited a range of devices and platforms, such as Android, iOS, and Windows, with the PSS cluster primarily targeting domestic audiences in Palestine. The other set of attacks went after users in the Palestinian territories and Syria and, to a lesser extent Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya. Both the groups appear to have leveraged the platform as a springboard to launch a variety of social engineering attacks in

In what's likely to be a goldmine for bad actors, personal information associated with approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide has been leaked on a popular cybercrime forum for free—which was harvested by hackers in 2019 using a Facebook vulnerability. The  leaked data  includes full names, Facebook IDs, mobile numbers, locations, email addresses, gender, occupation, city, country, marital status broken, account creation date, and other profile details broken down by country, with over 32 million records belonging to users in the U.S., 11 million users the U.K., and six million users in India, among others. Also included in the leak are  phone numbers  from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and co-founders Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz, who are the fourth, fifth, and sixth members to have registered on Facebook. Interestingly, it appears that the same phone number is also registered to his name on the privacy-focussed messaging app Signal. "Mark Zuckerberg als

Facebook may be banned in China, but the company on Wednesday said it has disrupted a network of bad actors using its platform to target the Uyghur community and lure them into downloading malicious software that would allow surveillance of their devices. "They targeted activists, journalists and dissidents predominantly among Uyghurs from Xinjiang in China primarily living abroad in Turkey, Kazakhstan, the United States, Syria, Australia, Canada and other countries," Facebook's Head of Cyber Espionage Investigations, Mike Dvilyanski, and Head of Security Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher,  said . "This group used various cyber espionage tactics to identify its targets and infect their devices with malware to enable surveillance." The social media giant said the "well-resourced and persistent operation" aligned with a threat actor known as  Evil Eye  (or Earth Empusa), a China-based collective known for its history of espionage attacks against the Muslim m

In January 2019, a  critical flaw  was reported in Apple's FaceTime group chats feature that made it possible for users to initiate a FaceTime video call and eavesdrop on targets by adding their own number as a third person in a group chat even before the person on the other end accepted the incoming call. The vulnerability was deemed so severe that the iPhone maker removed the FaceTime group chats feature altogether before the issue was resolved in a subsequent iOS update. Since then, a number of similar shortcomings have been discovered in multiple video chat apps such as Signal, JioChat, Mocha, Google Duo, and Facebook Messenger — all thanks to the work of Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich. "While [the Group FaceTime] bug was soon fixed, the fact that such a serious and easy to reach vulnerability had occurred due to a logic bug in a calling state machine — an attack scenario I had never seen considered on any platform — made me wonder whether other sta

WhatsApp said on Friday that it wouldn't enforce its recently announced  controversial data sharing policy  update until May 15. Originally set to go into effect next month on February 8, the three-month delay comes following "a lot of misinformation" about a revision to its privacy policy that allows WhatsApp to share data with Facebook, sparking widespread concerns about the exact kind of information that will be shared under the incoming terms. The Facebook-owned company has since repeatedly clarified that the update does not expand its ability to share personal user chats or other profile information with Facebook and is instead simply providing further transparency about how user data is collected and shared when using the messaging app to interact with businesses. "The update includes new options people will have to message a business on WhatsApp, and provides further transparency about how we collect and use data," WhatsApp  said  in a post. "W

"Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA," opens WhatsApp's  privacy policy . "Since we started WhatsApp, we've aspired to build our Services with a set of strong privacy principles in mind." But come February 8, 2021, this opening statement will no longer find a place in the policy. The Facebook-owned messaging service is alerting users in India of an update to its  terms of service  and  privacy policy  that's expected to go into effect next month. The "key updates" concern how it processes user data, "how businesses can use Facebook hosted services to store and manage their WhatsApp chats," and "how we partner with Facebook to offer integrations across the Facebook Company Products." The mandatory changes allow WhatsApp to  share  more user data with other Facebook companies, including account registration information, phone numbers, transaction data, service-related information, interactions on the platform,

Cybersecurity researchers from Facebook today formally linked the activities of a Vietnamese threat actor to an IT company in the country after the group was caught abusing its platform to hack into people's accounts and distribute malware. Tracked as  APT32  (or Bismuth, OceanLotus, and Cobalt Kitty), the state-aligned operatives affiliated with the Vietnam government have been known for orchestrating sophisticated  espionage campaigns  at least since 2012 with the goal of furthering the country's strategic interests. "Our investigation linked this activity to CyberOne Group, an IT company in Vietnam (also known as CyberOne Security, CyberOne Technologies, Hành Tinh Company Limited, Planet and Diacauso)," Facebook's Head of Security Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, and Cyber Threat Intelligence Manager, Mike Dvilyanski,  said . Exact evidence trail leading Facebook to attribute the hacking activity to CyberOne Group was not disclosed, but according to a descripti

The US Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of 48 state attorneys general on Wednesday filed a pair of sweeping antitrust suits against Facebook, alleging that the company abused its power in the marketplace to neutralize competitors through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp and depriving users of better privacy-friendly alternatives. "Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy — including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anti-competitive conditions on software developers — to eliminate threats to its monopoly," the FTC  said  in its complaint. A  separate lawsuit  filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James also claimed that in illegally acquiring competitors in a predatory manner, the social media company stripped users of the benefits of competition, limited consumer choices, and their access to rivals with better privacy practices. Specifically,

More than six years after Facebook launched its ambitious Free Basics program to bring the Internet to the masses, the social network is back at it again with a new zero-rating initiative called Discover . The service, available as a mobile web and Android app, allows users to browse the Internet using free daily data caps. Facebook Discover is currently being tested in Peru in partnership with local telecom companies such as Bitel, Claro, Entel, and Movistar. Unlike the regular rich-content browsing, Facebook's latest connectivity project only provides low-bandwidth text-only based browsing, meaning other forms of data-intensive content such as audio and video are not supported. Another key differentiator is that it treats all websites equally, whereas users of Free Basics are limited to a handful of sites that are submitted by developers and meet technical criteria set by Facebook. The move, ultimately, drew criticism for violating principles of net neutrality ,

Facebook is one of the world's biggest advertising platforms, and that's because it knows a lot about you, me, and everyone. Facebook uses many tools to track people across the Internet, whether they have an account with the social networking site or not, and most of them rely on the online activity data other apps and websites share with Facebook. Everything we do online generates an extensive amount of behavioral data, from buying clothes to looking for hotels, which apps and websites often share with advertising companies, allowing them to build more accurate profiles of your interests and needs. However, after facing worldwide criticism over privacy and data breach controversies, Facebook last summer announced a privacy tool, called Off-Facebook Activity , which gives users more control of their data collected by Facebook. Starting today on Data Privacy Day 2020 , the Off-Facebook Activity feature is now available to every user around the world, which was initiall

Following its efforts to take legal action against those misusing its social media platform, Facebook has now filed a new lawsuit against a Hong Kong-based advertising company and two Chinese individuals for allegedly abusing its ad platform to distribute malware and Ad fraud. Facebook filed the lawsuit on Thursday in the Northern District of California against ILikeAd Media International Company Ltd. as well as a Chinese software developer and a marketing director working for the firm, Chen Xiao Cong and Huang Tao. All three defendants have been alleged to have deceived people into installing malware on their systems, enabling them to compromise user's Facebook accounts and then using those hacked accounts to advertise counterfeit goods and diet pills—which is clearly in violation of Facebook's Terms and Advertising Policies. "The suit seeks to hold accountable ILikeAd Media International Company Ltd. and Chen Xiao Cong and Huang Tao for creating the malware, tr

Two third-party software development kits integrated by over hundreds of thousands of Android apps have been caught holding unauthorized access to users' data associated with their connected social media accounts. In a blog post published yesterday, Twitter revealed that an SDK developed by OneAudience contains a privacy-violating component which may have passed some of its users' personal data to the OneAudience servers. Following Twitter's disclosure, Facebook today released a statement revealing that an SDK from another company, Mobiburn , is also under investigation for a similar malicious activity that might have exposed its users connected with certain Android apps to data collection firms. Both OneAudience and Mobiburn are data monetization services that pay developers to integrate their SDKs into the apps, which then collect users' behavioral data and then use it with advertisers for targeted marketing. In general, third-party software development k

The recent controversies surrounding the WhatsApp hacking haven't yet settled, and the world's most popular messaging platform could be in the choppy waters once again. The Hacker News has learned that last month WhatsApp quietly patched yet another critical vulnerability in its app that could have allowed attackers to remotely compromise targeted devices and potentially steal secured chat messages and files stored on them. The vulnerability — tracked as CVE-2019-11931 — is a stack-based buffer overflow issue that resided in the way previous WhatsApp versions parse the elementary stream metadata of an MP4 file, resulting in denial-of-service or remote code execution attacks. To remotely exploit the vulnerability, all an attacker needs is the phone number of targeted users and send them a maliciously crafted MP4 file over WhatsApp, which eventually can be programmed to install a malicious backdoor or spyware app on the compromised devices silently. The vulnerability

It appears that Facebook at the center of yet another issue involving privacy. Reportedly, multiple iPhone users have come forward on social media complaining that the Facebook app secretly activates their smartphone's camera in the background while they scroll through their Facebook feeds or looking at the photos on the social network. As shown in the Twitter videos below, when users click on an image or video on the social media to full screen and then return it back to normal, an issue with the Facebook app for iOS slightly shifts the app to the right. It opens a space on the left from where users can see the iPhone's camera activated in the background. However, at this moment, it's not clear if it's just an UI bug where Facebook app incorrectly but only accesses the camera interface, or if it also records or uploads something, which, if proven right, would be the most disastrous moment in Facebook's history. Found a @facebook #security & #pri