Researchers have discovered 540 million recordings of Facebook users on exposed servers – TechCrunch



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Security researchers have found hundreds of millions of Facebook user records sitting on a public storage server inadvertently.

The two sets of user registrations were collected and exposed by two third-party companies, according to researchers at UpGuard security company, who found the data.

In the writing of the researchers, Cultura Colectiva, a Mexico-based digital media company, has left more than 540 million records – including comments, likes, reactions, account names and more – stored on the Amazon S3 storage server without pbadword, allowing anyone to access the data. Another backup file on a storage server separated by The deceased application creator, At The Pool, California, contained even more sensitive data, including information extracted from more than 22,000 users, such as friend lists, news centers, and more. interest, photos, group memberships and recordings.

According to UpGuard, neither company responded to requests for data deletion. Facebook has contacted Amazon to extract data offline, said a Facebook spokesman at TechCrunch.

"Facebook's policies prohibit storing Facebook's information in a public database," the spokesman said. Facebook said that there was no evidence that the data had been misused, but that the investigation was ongoing.

This is the latest data failure involving the social media giant since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, which saw over 87 million Facebook user records erased without consent by the political data company based in the United Kingdom. The company has been accused of using the data to create voter profiles to help the presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

As a result of the scandal, the social media giant has launched a bug bonus program to cover third-party applications and services that have leaked or exposed Facebook user data.

UpGuard had previously discovered a scraped Facebook lot involving 48 million records in 2018 from Localblox, a data company that extracts data from social network profiles.

Chris Vickery, director of IT risk research at UpGuard, told TechCrunch: "These findings continue to highlight the issues that affect businesses that rely on mbad data collection."

"Storing personal information collected from end users is a responsibility," said Vickery. "The more you have, the greater the responsibility becomes."

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