why they fear there are more cyber scams and fake news

The seven hour blackout of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp generated annoyance for many users, but something much more serious for 3.5 billion people who depend on social media to run their business or communicate with family members. At the same time, the consequences of this technical inconvenience could also lead to a the escalation of cyber scams and the proliferation of fake news.

Mark Zuckerberg’s closure of digital empire revealed the power and global reach of Facebook, also owner of the photo and instant messaging applications.

All over the world, the fall of WhatsApp has left many people in awe. Both in countries that Argentina and Brazil, the messaging service is by far the most used application to communicate, installed in around 90% of cell phones, according to data from specialists and the technology pollster Mobile time.

For example, WhatsApp has become indispensable in the neighboring country for communications not only between friends and families but also between businesses and their customers, in universities and for daily transactions such as ordering food.

Offices, departments and even courts struggled to schedule appointments, and phone lines were overwhelmed without traditional self-management channels.

“Today’s court underlined our Facebook addiction and its properties like WhatsApp and Instagram, ”said Brooke Erin Duffy, professor of communications at Cornell University, United States. Huge categories of workers depend for their income on the operation of the platforms.

The technical issues that led to the downfall of services are an example of how entrepreneurs and small businesses suffer whenever Facebook or others incorporate a new prop or change how it works in some way. .

A technical failure that worries

After seven hours without access to the main services and while all kinds of theories were woven on the cause of the technical problem, from a cyberattack to the complete disappearance of the social network, Facebook explained in a brief press release the reasons that caused this blackout.

“Our engineering teams found that configuration changes to the main routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers were causing issues that they interrupted this communicationSantosh Janardhan, vice president of infrastructure for the company, said Tuesday.

“This interruption in network traffic had a cascade effect in the way our data centers communicate, which has crippled our services, ”he added.

“We want to clarify at this point that we believe that the main cause of this disturbance was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data has been compromised as a result of this downtime, ”Janardhan continued.

According to some experts outside the company, the blocking of services was directly due to a BGP and DNS type problem (Domain Name System), a failure on the company’s server. In other words, when the user searches the domain of sites, or accesses applications, the address cannot be located on the Internet.

It’s surprising that Facebook struggled to apply this new setup, as these types of companies often test changes in test environments first before applying them in the data center. “It’s as if you had changed the lock on the door and forgot the key”, summarizes a computer scientist.

Others, like Camilo Gutierrez, head of laboratory of ESET Latin America, analyzed the consequences that the blackout will have in terms of cybercriminality which, as is often the case, tend to go viral via WhatsApp.

“It is very likely that as a result of this fact, fake news will spread, links to supposedly update a password or request additional information. That is why it is important to know that when such incidents occur which involve a large number of users, cybercriminals often take advantage of this to carry out their deceptions. It is important to be vigilant“said the ESET engineer.

SL