Meta uncovered a black market in Facebook accounts organized by a group of employees and contractors. Their goal: to sell control of disabled legitimate accounts to hackers for thousands of dollars.
Data protection has always been a hot topic at Meta. Despite the company’s promises on the confidentiality of personal information, it is discovered that employees have access to user accounts. Worse still, it seems that in recent years some of them have abused their privileges to do business with hackers. And only now is the company finding out and taking corrective action.
New scandal at Facebook
Thursday, November 17, the wall street journal (WSJ) reported that Meta disciplined or fired more than two dozen employees for hijacking Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021. The employees in question were Meta employees as well as security guards working for the contractor. Allied Universal. To commit their misdeeds, they abused their access to the internal system called “Online Operations” or “Oops”.
Oops is Meta’s own software. It is supposed to allow employees to help users recover their account in the event of a hack or a problem with their password. In principle, this method of account recovery is subject to an exceptional procedure. However, Meta discovered that about twenty of its employees and subcontractors kept a veritable black market of accounts based on their access to Oops. Note that people with access to the software were able to operate on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp as well.
Difficult to trust Meta
the wall street journal spotted that while in 2017 this software only performed 22,000 tasks, in 2020 that number had risen to 50,270. After investigation, it was revealed that the group of employees and contractors had been dealing with scammers, offering them thousands of dollars in exchange for controlling deactivated accounts or accounts belonging to famous influencers.
Although Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company was already taking ” appropriate measures », it’s a safe bet that this scandal is added to the bad press of Meta. And this, even if the company is stepping up its actions to protect the privacy of users by asking for less information about them. The problem is that even though users wanted to give the company credit, shocking information about how Facebook harvests user data without their knowledge keeps coming to light.
Sources: Engadget, wall street journal
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