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Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data from 14M People

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Re: Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data from 14M People

#32

Facebook posting: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/update-on-security-issu... Check if you are affected here: https://www.facebook.com/help/securitynotice (posting because it took 10+ mins to find it - many media outlets are not linking directly to it)

They should not require you to log in to their site to look up whether they have victimized you. I used to have a FB account but threw the random password away. Was I affected? No way to know?

Re: Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data from 14M People

#33
post #6

This is why I hate not having custom security questions from Banks. What is my fathers middle name? Well, if you have facebook and he puts it up there you can find out. I have no control over that. I could start using fake answers but trying to remember the fake answers vs real answers is tough. Whereas when I get a custom question I have a custom answer that I will always remember. Such as made up on the spot Name o…

The hackers stole session tokens. It's not about passwords and security (well it is, but not on the user level), it's about better securing access to certain data.

Re: Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data from 14M People

#34

Facebook posting: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/update-on-security-issu... Check if you are affected here: https://www.facebook.com/help/securitynotice (posting because it took 10+ mins to find it - many media outlets are not linking directly to it)

FB should timestamp these articles. It happened a couple of weeks ago, or is this new news?

Re: Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data from 14M People

#35

Logged in today and found: "[name], we have more information about the security incident we discovered on September 25, 2018. An unauthorized third party accessed your name, email address and phone number. We acted quickly to secure the site and took action to protect your account, and we're working closely with law enforcement to address the incident." Ridiculous.

> name, email address and phone number I kind of work on the assumption that those things are largely public. I mean, phone books were a thing for a very long time. Don't get me wrong, leak bad, very bad, but they didn't leak my bank accounts or a list of my worst fears.

Did you read the article?

"For 14 million people, the attackers accessed the same two sets of information, as well as other details people had on their profiles. This included username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birthdate, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or Pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches. "

The attackers accessed different info for different groups of people.

Re: Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data from 14M People

#36
post #9

That's one of the numerous reasons I'll never use fb as a payment or ecommerce platform when they launch these products.

I doubt other payment or ecommerce platforms are any more secure. Given its size, I assume Facebook has a lot of smart people working on security. And they still screw it up. How are smaller platforms, who can't attract or pay for the very best talent, going to do any better (other than by being smaller targets, I guess)?

A payment company needs to worry about payment. Facebook has a ton of other features, any of which can be a vector for a hack.

Re: Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data from 14M People

#37

Facebook posting: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/update-on-security-issu... Check if you are affected here: https://www.facebook.com/help/securitynotice (posting because it took 10+ mins to find it - many media outlets are not linking directly to it)

They should not require you to log in to their site to look up whether they have victimized you. I used to have a FB account but threw the random password away. Was I affected? No way to know?

Likewise. They should send a notification to all e-mails on record for compromised accounts.

Re: Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data from 14M People

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are social engineering a random string when talking to customer care. The attacker says “Ah, a bunch of random characters, do I have to say it?” or even worse I have had a customer service rep look at it, laugh and say never mind. I use “batteryhorsestaple” type of passwords stored in a password manager for the security questions. Those are easy to say over the phone and more resistant to social engineering.

Good point. Looking at my database it seems that most of the time I just choose fake answers, and sometimes use words that don't relate to the question (e.g., "Favorite food: Manchester").

I used to use real answers but then wised up and switched to random 16-character responses. I wish there was a way to find out which services I’m vulnerable on due to my stupidly using real data, without attempting to do a password reset on all of my online accounts.

Re: Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data from 14M People

#40
post #19
post #6

This is why I hate not having custom security questions from Banks. What is my fathers middle name? Well, if you have facebook and he puts it up there you can find out. I have no control over that. I could start using fake answers but trying to remember the fake answers vs real answers is tough. Whereas when I get a custom question I have a custom answer that I will always remember. Such as made up on the spot Name o…

In my password manager, I save nonsensical answers (not a string of random characters) to built-in questions.

Wait, wait, was your high school mascot the leprous gummywormbat too?
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