India asks Facebook for update on hacking impact
Demanding an update over the impact of hacking incident on Indian users, the Information and Technology Ministry on Monday asked Facebook to apprise the government on the number of Indian users affected by the recent hacking incident, senior IT officials said. Facebook officials responded by saying that they were analysing the issue and will revert in two days, the officials added.
Hackers had exploited a vulnerability in its system, Facebook had said last week, adding that up to 50 million accounts were impacted by the act.
Mark Zuckerberg, during a press call, had said the company's engineering team, on September 25, found an attack affecting up to 50 million accounts on Facebook.
"The attackers exploited a vulnerability in the code of the 'View As' feature which is a privacy feature that lets people see what their Facebook profile would look like to another person," he added.
Since the investigation is still in its early stage, Facebook has yet not been able to determine if there are any specific targeting, Zuckerberg had said.
Stating that hackers had tried to access profile information fields -- like name, gender and hometown, Zuckerberg said "we do not yet know if any private information was accessed that way".
Facebook however, had said it had fixed the vulnerability and had also informed the law enforcement.
The social media giant was hit by controversy earlier in the year too, when UK-based data mining firm Cambridge Analytica was accused of harvesting personal user data of 87 million global users of the social networking platform illegally to influence polls in several countries.
