Advisory over Facebook leak concerning 6.1 million Indians: CERT


By MYBRANDBOOK


Advisory over Facebook leak concerning 6.1 million Indians: CERT

 

CERT-In has advised Facebook users to strengthen their account privacy settings after a recent global 'data scraping' incident in the social media platform was detected that affected about 61 lakh Indians.

 

It further said, parts of your account could be public. Data could also be collected and shared in ways you don't know about, the CERT-In said in a public advisory issued on Monday.

 

It has been reported that globally there has been a large scale leakage of Facebook profile information. The exposed information includes email addresses, profile ID, full name, job occupation, phone numbers and birth date.

 

"According to Facebook, the scraped information does not include financial information, health information or passwords, however information from more than 450 million unique Facebook profiles globally, including approximately 61 lakh Indian individuals, has been made publicly available in multiple cyber criminal forums for free," the advisory said while explaining the breach.

 

Cyber criminals may scrape data from sites for a variety of purposes, including spamming, information gathering and social engineering attacks. They can also sell scrapped data for a profit to other cyber criminals, marketing companies or call centres," it said.

 

The advisory, while asking users of this popular social media platform to follow good cyber hygiene practices, also said that Facebook has advised individuals to "make sure that their privacy settings reflect what information they want to share publicly and who they want to be able to look them by phone number".

 

Facebook said, has also recommended account holders to enable two-factor authentication also know as 2FA. It also recommended that users can consider changing their profile settings to "private" or "friends" only as data scrapers can use "public" information of an individual to "match and combine with data from other breaches to access even more of their personal information and accounts".

 

It also asked users to adjust their settings to who can find and contact them on Facebook and consider whether to set them all to "friends" or stricter for stronger security.

 

The recent integration process started among Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp . An Italian code-digger Alessandro Paluzzi discovered a WhatsApp chat hidden inside the Facebook Messenger code. He forced a thread to make it recognisable as a WhatsApp chat, to act as a preview for when the feature is available after the integration is complete.

 

As per the report from a cyber intelligence company Group-IB says, it has detected a large-scale campaign targeting facebook messenger users across the world.

 

The Group-IB Digital Risk Protection (DRP) says, there are evidences found that users in over 80 countries in Europe, Asia, the MEA region, North and South America might have been affected. The company said in the statement, by distributing ads promoting an allegedly updated version of Facebook Messenger, cybercriminals harvested users login credentials.

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