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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

#81

I guess I don't really understand the frustration of some people. I do but I don't. I don't have a facebook account, or instagram, or any social media, haven't had one in many years. No one NEEDS to have one. I guess to me, if you don't want this info to be exposed, just don't have an account. Assume the worst can happen. This is not like other sites, I get that you're "trusting" them with your info, but you are will…

You forget that you don't need to have a Facebook account for Facebook to create a profile for you. You just have to exist.

The same is true for many other social networks.

So while you're posting about being all smug and happy that you never signed up for one of these services, your personal data is still in their servers, ready to be exploited by both the company and hackers.

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

#83

I guess I don't really understand the frustration of some people. I do but I don't. I don't have a facebook account, or instagram, or any social media, haven't had one in many years. No one NEEDS to have one. I guess to me, if you don't want this info to be exposed, just don't have an account. Assume the worst can happen. This is not like other sites, I get that you're "trusting" them with your info, but you are will…

but you are willingly putting your information there, just don't

I know you're the Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own a TV[1], but...

Facebook probably has a profile on you containing personally identifiable information. If literally anyone who has ever had your phone number or email address also had a Facebook account, and gave Facebook access to their contacts, that's the ballgame. So maybe be a little less sanctimonious about telling others not to give away their data, because I'd bet all the money in my wallet Facebook has data on you.

[1] https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-d...

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

#84

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

You do know that Shopify is owned by Facebook? It's already happening. A lot of custom online shops use this platform to run their business.

Shopify isn't owned by Facebook.

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

#85
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FYI people will downvote you for suggesting someone hasn't read the post. (And I don't think it was necessary to make your point.) HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article.

Hm, that's a bit of a silly rule. This isn't the best example, but there are certainly instances where someone is arguing from a point of complete ignorance about details in the article. Even the rule's preferred example of "The article mentions that." still seems to me to insinuate someone hasn't read the article.

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

#87
post #65

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)

I forget what the text looks like in your second link when you're not logged in but after I logged in the verification text appears as follows: """ Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue? Based on what we've learned so far, your Facebook account has not been impacted by this security incident. If we find more Facebook accounts were impacted, we will reset their access tokens and notify those accounts.…

I see the same thing. Wonder if anyone was informed that actually had been affected.

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

#88
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As we just saw with Google and Google+.

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

#89
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is new, particularly the details around search history and location data being stolen, as of an hour ago.

I think it's the security incident that happened couple of weeks ago and they have more details now?

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

#90
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that ridiculous? Here are the facts: 1. A software company had a security incident. 2. They urgently resolved the issue. 3. They looked into who was impacted, and sent customized notifications letting people know how they were impacted. None of this behavior is ridiculous. It's quite responsible. What would you expect to happen differently?

Well, let's see. A feature used to view profile information had a vulnerability that allowed an attacker to get my phone number. My phone number isn't even listed on my profile. This means the credentials from the original implementation of said feature weren't locked down to only data available from your viewable profile. While my phone number may be available elsewhere outside of FB, I only have it tied to my accou…

The vulnerability allowed the attacker to obtain an access token for your site. So with that access token, they presumably had full access to everything as if they were you. Hence their ability to get a phone number not listed.

I'm not sure if the web interface uses those same access tokens, but the mobile app probably does. So they were probably able to access everything using unpublished API endpoints that the mobile app would normally use.

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