Recent cyber attacks that have used ransomware as their attack vector include attacks perpetrated against the Colonial Pipeline, Steamship Authority of Massachusetts, JBS (the world’s largest meatpacker), and the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department. Over the past few months (and years), we have seen an increase in ransomware attacks, many of them high-profile attacks.
These criminals will only give you the key to access your system, or return the files, once you’ve paid their ransom. So what does that mean? Hackers take advantage of security weak spots to steal sensitive data or lock files. Ransomware actors often target and threaten to sell or leak exfiltrated data or authentication information if the ransom is not paid.” Malicious actors then demand ransom in exchange for decryption. Government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Assurance Agency ( CISA): “Ransomware is an ever-evolving form of malware designed to encrypt files on a device, rendering any files and the systems that rely on them unusable. The less you make public, the more private and secure you will likely be.According to the U.S. Go through all of the sections in your Facebook profile on the left, and consider setting them to Private or Friends on the right. Change your profile information to private in your Facebook privacy settings.ĭuring this breach, hackers took profile information that was set as open to “Public” or shared with “Friends.” This information can be matched and combined with data from other breaches to access even more of your personal information and accounts. If you have ever signed up for a Facebook account - even if you don’t use it now - we recommend you take these steps to protect yourself:ġ. You can check to see if your phone number was in the leak at.
#RECENT FACEBOOK HACKING NEWS PASSWORD#
In Facebook privacy settings, people had “who can look you up using the phone number you provided” set to “Everyone”Įven if your Facebook login, email or password information isn’t in this dataset, your phone number may still be vulnerable.Profile data being set to “Public” or share with “Friends”.
etc.Ī combination of privacy settings led to data vulnerability: Then they wiped the device and did the same thing with another batch of 10k phone numbers, etc. They loaded, say, 10k phone numbers into the address book of the emulated device, installed Facebook’s mobile app, and used the app’s “import contacts” feature to get the rest of the profile data for those 10k phone numbers.
#RECENT FACEBOOK HACKING NEWS ANDROID#
From what has been reported, the individuals probably used Android emulators, which is software that simulates an Android device on a computer. Instead, it was “scraped” from information that users themselves made visible.Īttackers scraped Facebook data by exploiting a vulnerability in Facebook’s Contact Importer feature in 2019.
Most of this data does not seem to have been acquired through typical data breach methods, meaning it wasn’t collected by breaking into Facebook’s databases. Some records also included birth dates, location, relationship status and employer. It appears that most records included Facebook ID numbers, names, gender and phone numbers. What was in the April 2021 Facebook data leak?ĭata for more than 500 million Facebook accounts was included in this data dump.