Facebook has exposed a bug in the phone numbers and emails of six million accounts to unauthorized users. The problem has now been solved.
For an unspecified period of time, a bug of Facebook has exposed to unauthorized telephone numbers and email addresses of as many as six million users around the globe . This vulnerability was discovered last week through the program hacker “White Hat” Facebook and it relates, in particular, the instrument of the social network that lets you download your account information .
As noted by the company, the bug was born at the end of 2012 and allowed users (but not the developers or advertisers) to get the phone numbers and email addresses of your friends on Facebook:
“When users upload their list of contacts on Facebook we try to compare that data with information from other users on Facebook in order to generate suggestions. For example, we do not recommend someone to invite contacts to join Facebook if they are already on Facebook . Because of the bug some of the information that we used were inadvertently stored with the contact information of the users as if they were part of their Facebook account. “
All this has affected especially those who had indicated that data as private but it was publicly exposed because of the vulnerability, so for six million users it was a real security breach . Facebook stated that it had no evidence that the bug has been exploited by the bad guys and, above all, that none of the members of the Platform complained, at least so far.
Despite this, Facebook acknowledges that it was a violation of privacy settings and considered it of having to alert the relevant authorities in Europe and North America. The bug is already fixed : to find out if you are among those six million users affected by the vulnerability, it is sufficient to check your e-mail and see if there is an email by Facebook, in which the company explains what happened.
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