Spammers Behind Historic Data Breach Affecting Millions of Facebook Users

As reported by Wall Street Journal, Facebook tentatively concluded that it was not the hackers working for the nation-state, but the spammers disguised as digital marketing company are behind the huge security breach that was discovered last month.

Since the biggest historic security breach was discovered on 25 September 2018, Facebook has taken up the investigation of the hack. Initially Facebook presumed that around 50 million accounts of user have been affected by the breach, however it now believes that the figure is around 29 million users, whose personal details have been compromised that includes their email addresses as well as phone numbers.

The aim of the spammers was to make money via deceptive advertising, and therefore, disguised itself as a digital marketing company. This was revealed by the people, familiar with Facebook's (i.e. the company's) internal investigation, to the Wall Street Journal. The company has declined to comment anything on the culprit behind the hack, worst security breach in Facebook's history as posted on October 17, 2018, by usatoday.com.

Guy Rosen, the VP of Product Management, gives a statement last week that "we are cooperating with the FBI on this matter. The FBI is actively investigating and has asked us not to discuss who might be behind the attack".

Although the social networking website (i.e. Facebook) does not reveal anything on the culprit behind the hack, but they said that one should not relate it to the upcoming midterm elections in the US.

Out of all affected users, 14 million users' contact details, names, and other sensitive data and information that include recent location check-ins were compromised; 15 million users' only names and contact details were exposed; whereas one million users' access tokens were stolen. Facebook, however, has already reset access tokens for each of those users.

The repercussion of the security breach of the users is such that it badly affected public relations campaign of the social networking website. Facebook is always saying more than two billion users, who are regular user of the service, that it is taking all serious measures to protect its users' personal information.

» SPAMfighter News - 10/26/2018