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By Marlene Awaad / Bloomberg.
As Americans settled on the imminent Senate vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh at the Supreme Court, Facebook has dropped its own bomb. Earlier this week, the social media giant discovered that a successful attack on its network was potentially exposing 50 million Facebook users to a violation of their privacy. According to one After posting on the company's website on Friday, hackers exploited Facebook's "As View" feature, which allows users to see how others see their profile, to take over vulnerable accounts.
Facebook claims to have already solved the problem, warned law enforcement and is at the very beginning of an investigation. Still, the company's executives seemed deeply troubled by this third security incident over the last four months. On a call to journalists, a tired sound Mark Zuckerberg He added that it was too early to know if any of the accounts were actually being misused. But, he added, that could of course change. At the moment, company representatives do not know exactly who the hackers are. they were state actors or if they targeted a particular group of users.
An incredulous journalist reminded Zuckerberg of his commitment earlier this year in response to the Cambridge Analytica case: "We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can not, we do not deserve to serve you. the question of knowing he still believes that Facebook deserves this trust. "It's a very serious safety problem," he said. "It's a problem that happened first. This highlights the attacks that our community and our services face and the need to be more proactive in protecting our community. We certainly need to do it.
In fact, as revealed during a second call with reporters on Friday afternoon, this week's hacking was uncomfortably similar to the Cambridge Analytica violation. According to Facebook VP of Product Management Guy Rosen, This vulnerability could have allowed hackers to use a compromised Facebook account to connect to connected third-party applications. Facebook declined to confirm on his call that it was the biggest data breach in Facebook's history.
The timing of the disclosure, just six weeks before the midterm elections, could not be worse for Facebook, which is already under scrutiny for privacy and data security practices. On Wednesday, Gizmodo reported that Facebook has collected the phone numbers of users who have enabled two-factor authentication – a standard security feature for many websites and apps – and have used them to target users with ads. On the same day, Forbes published an interview in which WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who left Facebook to create a non-profit organization and tore up Facebook's "practices, principles, and ethical rules," claiming he regretted selling WhatsApp to a company that abuses users' privacy. "I made a choice and a compromise," he explained. "And I live with it every day." (In a blog, Facebook frame David Marcus criticized Acton as "lower class" for "attacking the people and society that made you a billionaire".
The prospect of another data breach will make it even more difficult for Facebook to recover from the Cambridge Analytica scandal of last year, in which the British data mining company was unable to obtain the data. of nearly 90 million Facebook users. In the months that followed, Facebook worked hard to reassure its more than 2 billion users, believing their data was in good hands, spending millions on a promising advertising campaign promising to return to "what made Facebook a success. In the expectation of a stern regulatory response, Zuckerberg testified before Congress in April to reassure lawmakers that Facebook is doing everything in its power to combat cyber threats.
The latest hacking could also be expensive: according to the terms of the Federal Trade Commission, which launched a survey of Facebook's privacy practices earlier this year, Facebook could be responsible for tens of thousands of dollars in fines. If found to have violated the F.T.C. The damage could be trillions, although a settlement is probably several orders of magnitude. The second. has also launched a survey on Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In response, Facebook said it has tried to reduce the amount of data shared with developers by cutting access to hundreds of third-party applications and setting up stricter data sharing policies. But a series of other data alerts are questioning Facebook's capabilities. In June, a software bug changed the privacy settings of Facebook users without their consent. A month later, user security was potentially compromised by a separate bug that accidentally unblocked the people that a user had blocked. This new violation – potentially the most damaging for Facebook – will not help Zuckerberg try, once again, to rehabilitate the image of the platform.
This article has been updated.
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