The controversy surrounding Facebook is proving to be a never-ending thrill ride of new revelations. The company has stated that “malicious actors,” their term for hackers, had taken advantage of Facebook’s search tools to compile detailed information on the majority of its 2 billion users around the world.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post writes that Facebook acknowledged the following in a blog post:
“Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped.”
This was an effort by hackers to target everyone using the site over the course of many years.
Here’s how they did it:
- The hackers would go to the “dark web” to get a list of email addresses and phone numbers.
- Then they would feed those lists into the “search” bar on Facebook, giving them access to people’s profiles and information.
- Finally, the hackers would use the data to launch identity thefts and other malicious online activity.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced that they plan to add restrictions to further regulate how outside parties can gain access to users’ personal information.
Here are more details about the hack and what this means for the future of Facebook, including possible FTC violations.
And here is a worthwhile video and a transcript of a Tech Crunch interview with Mark Zuckerberg from last night.