Facebook is warning users following
the discovery of a breach that could result in the leak of information
on around six million accounts.
The company said that the bug, reported
through its WhiteHat security research programme, had left the email and
phone numbers of certain users visible to those who may not be
connections on the social-networking platform.
The company said that the bug is
connected to its contact recommendation feature. When users upload their
phone numbers and email addresses to the service, Facebook can use the
information along with user-uploaded contact lists to create invites and
friend recommendations.
However, researchers found out that
Facebook's Download Your Information feature will inadvertently store
data, which some of the six million users who uploaded email and phone
numbers may not have intended to share.
The company said in an alert to users:
“Because of the bug, some of the information used to make friend
recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send was
inadvertently stored in association with people’s contact information as
part of their account on Facebook.
“As a result, if a person went to
download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your
Information tool, they may have been provided with additional email
addresses or telephone numbers for their contacts or people with whom
they have some connection.”
The company said that it is working on a
fix, but in the meantime it has disabled the Download Your Information
option. Facebook noted that the impact of the bug is expected to be
minimal as the data will only be available to users who are already
friends or contacts.
The breach could steal away some of the momentum Facebook had hoped to gather when it announced a major update to its Instagram brand. The photo-sharing site on Wednesday announced that it would be enabling users to record and share short video clips.
No comments:
Post a Comment