Facebook: 540 million users data exposed on Amazon

Facebook is again at the heart of a controversy. Security researchers have discovered that personal data from hundreds of millions of users are publicly exposed and downloadable from Amazon's cloud servers. Nearly 150 GB of data containing identifiers, passwords, and other activity data.

Another scandal on the Facebook side, it has become a habit. There is not a month left without a new episode to prolong the long series of polemics related to personal data. This time, there is talk of a leak involving 540 million social network user data. They were stored in public and unprotected in the cloud on Amazon S3 servers. Two third-party application editors are behind this trivial and improbable mistake.

Facebook: millions of personal data freely available on Amazon's servers

These are researchers from the security company UpGuard who have put their finger on this data leak. Facebook has confirmed the information and claims to have worked with Amazon to make all data inaccessible.

"Facebook's policies prohibit storing the information in a public database," said a spokesman for the social network in a statement. "Once alerted, we worked with Amazon to remove the databases. We are committed to working with developers on our platform to protect personal data. "

It is indeed two third-party application developers who are at the origin of this leak. They have been carelessly storing information from millions of users on Amazon public servers, just as anyone could store files on Dropox or Google Drive without any safeguards.

UpGuard was able to download nearly 150 GB of files containing 540 million user data, all from both publishers: Cultura Colectiva, a Mexico-based company and developer of an old Facebook game called At The Pool.

The files contained identifiers, comments, photos, email addresses, but also passwords related to the applications concerned (and not those of Facebook) although there is a good chance that most users use the same password for both accounts.

If the social network can be released from the responsibility of this leak, it does not prevent that the scandals concerning him multiply since several months. A few days ago, Facebook was strongly criticized for allowing its employees to access the passwords of 200 million users. And there, it was not a mistake of developers of third-party applications not cautious.