Meta , the company formerly known as Facebook, is asking for help to prevent the personal data of hundreds of thousands of its users from being taken from its platform and published on the web (usually on the deep web or deep web, and sold in exchange for cryptocurrencies).
The network giant announced just a few days ago that it is expanding its bug bounty program, that is, it offers rewards to users who help identify, report and fix vulnerabilities in its applications, to carry out what is known as web scraping, which is an automated process of extracting large amounts of data from different websites.
Problems with user privacy
However, even when personal data is publicly available online, such as a username, it can potentially be exploited by hackers if it is collected along with other personal information such as dates of birth, email addresses, and location. It is for this reason that many websites, including Meta platforms, go out of their way to ban or limit web scraping, even though those guidelines are not always followed to the letter.
Meta’s announcement about possible privacy breaches of hundreds of thousands of users has come against the backdrop of a company debacle early last year in which the personal information of nearly 500 million Facebook users, including phone numbers, email addresses, and personal data such as marital status, was published on a website used by hackers. Facebook then said that the data had been mined throughout 2019, and that the issue was fixed that same year, but the release of the information prompted renewed concern about the company’s practices and treatment of data. multinational.
With the stolen information, hackers can use that data to carry out social engineering attacks, where they use the extracted personal data to persuade people to give them other, much more sensitive information , such as credit card numbers or passwords. banking apps. This type of data is what cybercriminals are looking for, but now Meta has put it all together in one place and it is easily accessible, so stealing it is much faster and easier.
The bug bounty initiative will reward researchers and users who help fix security issues through web scraping methods, including public data, which could allow criminals to bypass Meta firewalls and collect vast amounts of data. . The goal is to quickly identify and counter scenarios that could make web scraping less difficult for hackers to execute. It will also reward reports of unprotected databases published online.
