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262 views3 pages

Case Study

Uploaded by

Escoton, Dwight Lorence H.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Case Study: Meta formerly known as Facebook Data Breach 2021

Last April 2021, Facebook went through a data breach that exposed the personal
information of 533 million people/users. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission
Regulation (GDPR) laws were responsible for investigating this case. The incident
resulted in Meta, previously known as Facebook, being issued a substantial fine in
November 2022.

The data exposed from Facebook includes full names, phone numbers, locations,
and birthdates. A vulnerability in Facebook’s system was found by the hackers which
they have successfully exploited, allowing them to access and scrape the personal
information of millions of users. Meta formerly known as Facebook continues to work on
addressing the challenge with the industry. Since then, they made changes to their
systems to stop unauthorized data scraping, making the data more secure.

Facebook responded to the hackers by modifying their systems to prevent


unauthorized access to user’s data, not allowing them to scrape. Despite that, specific
security measures need clarification. The company has already taken steps to address
the issue and is reviewing the decisions made by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission
to protect user data and prevent similar incidents from happening again.

Frances Haugen was the one who released the leak. This result was reported by
The Wall Street Journal last September 2021 as The Facebook Files series, and the
Facebook Papersconsortium. In the following months, a consortium of news outlets.
The reports show that according to the internally commissioned studies, the
company(Facebook/Meta) is fully aware of the negative impacts on teenage users of
Instagram, and the violence in developing countries contributed by Facebook activity.

Another thing is this is not the first similar case of a data breach that involves the
said company. Last 2010, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was
collected without the user’s consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and
it was used for political advertising. An app called “This Is Your Digital Life”, developed
by the data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research was
used to collect Facebook user data last 2013. The app works by making the client reply
a arrangement of questions to make mental profiles of clients, and the collected
individual information and the user’s Facebook friend's information were used to build
Facebook’s Open Graph Platform.
The said app collected the data of 87 million Facebook profiles.Cambridge
Analytica utilized the data to provide analytical support for the presidential campaigns of
Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in 2016. Cambridge Analytica faced widespread
accusations of influencing the Brexit referendum, but the official investigation concluded
that the company's involvement was limited to some initial inquiries and that no
significant breaches occurred.

For further information, here is the timeline of history regarding the security
breaches at Facebook and Meta:

● 2005: MIT Proves a Point


● 2013: 6 Million Accounts Breached
● 2014: Cambridge Analytica
● March 2019: 600 Million Passwords
● April 2019: 540 Million Facebook Records Accessible on a Public Server
● September 2019: ...and Another 419 Million Facebook User Records
● December 2019: 300 Million Facebook Accounts on the Dark Web
● 2021: Half a Billion Accounts Leaked
● Limit Security Breaches with Facebook Security Settings

In summary, millions of users' personal information for the social media


platform now known as Meta was exposed in an October 2021 data breach. To that end,
how Meta addresses this and all other such incidents moving forward—and takes other
steps toward better data security—will be key to preventing this from happening again in
the future. This, however, is not a single case of its kind, as the company has been
involved in previous data breaches and controversies related to user data. With this
case, Meta needs to have tight security measures and strict measures on data
protection in order to regain and build back the trust of its users. These repetitive
breaches year in and out call for increasingly users becoming very proactive about their
privacy and utilizing available security settings in a bid to limit the potential breaches as
much as possible.
References:

Twingate Team. (2024). Facebook Data Breach: What & How It Happened?.
https://www.twingate.com/blog/tips/facebook-data-breach

2021 Facebook leak. (2024, June 21). In Wikipedia.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_leak

Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. (2024, August 8). In Wikipedia.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal

Noah Bisceglia. (2024). Facebook Hacks: A History of Security Breaches at Facebook


and Meta.
https://teampassword.com/blog/facebook-hacks-a-history-of-security-breaches-at-faceb
ook

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