Senator tells US Congress to take action on Facebook data breach
Facebook went on to admit that it was hit by a fresh data breach, which affected almost 50 million users. Senator Mark R. Warner (D-VA) has called for a full probe into the incident.
Warner, the Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and co-chair of the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus went on to say that it was high time that the Congress stepped up for taking action, in order to protect the security and privacy of users on social media.
The Democrat went on and said in a statement late on Friday that, "The news that at least 50 million Facebook users had their accounts compromised is deeply concerning. A full investigation should be swiftly conducted and made public so that we can understand more about what happened."
This happens to be the biggest-ever security breach, post-Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook went on to admit that hackers had broken into almost 50 million users' accounts and stole their "access tokens" or digital keys, which allowed them to use the tokens and take over people's accounts.
Warner also said that the disclosure is a warning in context to the dangers posed when "a small number of companies like Facebook or the credit bureau Equifax are able to accumulate so much personal data about individual Americans without adequate security measures".
"As I've said before - the era of the Wild West in social media is over," he told in the statement.
Facebook stated that it was taking all careful steps to reset access tokens for another 40 million accounts, which have been subjected to a "View As" look-up in 2017.
Rohit Chopra, the Rohit Chopra also tweeted about the incident, saying "I want answers".
Responding to the new data breach, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: "While I'm glad we found this, fixed the vulnerability, and secured the accounts that may be at risk, the reality is we need to continue developing new tools to prevent this from happening in the first place."
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Zuckerberg have encountered a couple of hearings at US Congress over Cambridge Analytica data breach, which had hit 87 million users.
Moreso, Facebook acknowledged that the phone numbers provided by its users for security purposes were used to target them with ads.
Facebook uses a phone number that users provide for two-factor authentication (2FA) -- a security technique, which provides the second layer of authentication to help keep accounts secure.
(With IANS inputs)
