India asks Facebook for an update on the impact of hacking



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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Bloomberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Bloomberg

New Delhi: The Ministry of Information Technology on Monday asked Facebook to provide an update on the impact on Indian users of the recent hacking incident, where about 50 million accounts were affected, have indicated sources.

According to senior officials of the Ministry of Information, Monday, Facebook was verbally invited to inform the government of the number of Indian users affected by the recent attack.

Facebook officials said they were analyzing the problem and that they would be back in two days, they added.

When contacted, Facebook declined to comment.

Last week, Facebook said hackers were exploiting a vulnerability in its system, impacting up to 50 million accounts. The US-based company has not revealed a country-specific impact.

Facebook, which has more than 200 million users in India, is among the countries with the largest number of users in the world. Mark Zuckerberg, in a press call, had said that the company's engineering team had discovered on Sept. 25 an attack affecting up to 50 million accounts on Facebook. "The attackers exploited a vulnerability in the code of the" View As "feature, a privacy feature that allows users to see what their Facebook profile would look like for another person," he added.

Zuckerberg said that hackers had tried to access the profile information fields, including the name, sex and city of origin, "we do not know yet if private information has been consulted in this way ".

Facebook said it had corrected the vulnerability and informed law enforcement agencies.

Earlier this year, Facebook was also under fire when the British data analytics company Cambridge Analytica was accused of collecting the personal data of 87 million users of the social networking platform. illegally to influence polls in several countries.

The company had criticized the problem with policymakers from all regions of the world, including the Indian government, which had sent two notices to the social networking giant for data breaches.

Zuckerberg, at that time at a joint hearing of the US Senate's Judiciary and Trade Committees, had apologized for the "serious breach of trust" and had promised to take steps to protect user data.

In response to the first notification from the Indian government, Facebook had admitted that around 5.62 people had been "potentially affected" by the data breach incident.

This story was published from a news agency thread without text modification. Only the title has been changed.

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