Facebook Security Breach 6M Users details exposed

Facebook said that a security breach caused it to inadvertently reveal the personal data of six million users including their phone numbers for the past year. Facebook says it uses this data so it can generate friend request recommendations.  It’s mystifying to explain how an entity as large and far reaching as Facebook could go a year without catching such a glaring breach. The bug, which was reported via Facebook’s crowd sourced, White Hat security researcher program, was a part of one of Facebook’s data download tools. Facebook introduced the tool, named “Download Your Information”, allows users to do just that: It provides a history of your Facebook data since you joined the network, including Timeline data, contact information, photos and videos.

 

This news could come as a shock to Facebook users who trusted the site's customized privacy settings. The social networking site landed up in controversy earlier this month when it revealed that 9,000 - 10,000 of its users' details were shared with the US authorities.  Facebook’s security team said in a blog post about the data breach on 21/06/13. "At Facebook, we take people’s privacy seriously, and we strive to protect people’s information to the very best of our ability. We implement many safeguards, hire the brightest engineers and train them to ensure we have only high-quality code behind the scenes of your Facebook experiences. We even have teams that focus exclusively on preventing and fixing privacy-related technical issues before they affect you. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .
We have already notified our regulators in the US, Canada and Europe, and we are in the process of notifying affected users via email. We appreciate the security researcher's report to our White Hat program, and have paid out a bug bounty to thank him for his efforts."

Facebook did not specify time period for which the user details were exposed but said the bug was reported only 'recently'. It has alerted its six million users whose personal details were exposed besides sending out an apology via email.

Here is the full text of the apology email:
Dear....,
Your privacy is incredibly important to everyone who works at Facebook, and we're dedicated to protecting your information. While many of us focus our full-time jobs on preventing or fixing issues before they affect anyone, we recently fell short of our goal and a technical bug caused your telephone number or email address to be accessible by another person.
The bug was limited in scope and likely only allowed someone you already know outside of Facebook to see your email address or telephone number. That said, we let you down and we are taking this error very seriously.
Describing what caused the bug can get pretty technical, but we want to explain how it happened. When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try to match that data with the contact information of other people on Facebook in order to generate friend recommendations. Because of the bug, the email addresses and phone numbers used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send were inadvertently stored in their account on Facebook, along with their uploaded contacts. As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, which included their uploaded contacts, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers.
Here is your contact Information (inadvertently accessible by at most 1 Facebook user):
[Phone number]
[Email address 1]
[Email address 2]
We estimate that 1 Facebook user saw this additional contact info displayed next to your name in their downloaded copy of their account information. No other info about you was shown and it's likely that anyone who saw this is not a stranger to you, even if you're not friends on Facebook.
We recognize that mistakenly sharing contact info is unacceptable, even if you are acquainted with people who saw these details, and we've taken measures to prevent this from happening again. For more information on the bug, please read our blog post.
All of us at Facebook take this issue very personally. We appreciate your ongoing use of Facebook, and are working every day to deliver the level of service you expect and deserve.
Thank you,
The Facebook Team

Securing Your Facebook Account

Facebook has emerged as the world’s most popular and largest social networking site with more than one billion users. Facebook has successfully marked its presence among teens as well as young and older adults. It’s a way to connect with your family or friends, a means of interaction with strangers.

Limit your connections

Most key privacy settings are accessible by clicking the arrow in the upper right-hand corner of your profile screen (next to your name and the Home button). From here, select Privacy Settings in the drop-down menu.  Click on Edit Settings next to the How You Connect option to begin your profile lockdown. This section contains five privacy settings.

Limit who can find you, contact you and post to your timeline.

Facebook offers many features to its users for a safe and secure online experience. Facebook has recently announced and added the full HTTPS support for the site to keep you protected from security threats like viruses, malware and hackers. But, if you are using HTTPS support, encrypted pages take longer to load and your account will be slower. The best part of Facebook, however, is that you can customize your account’s settings and privacy to suit your needs.

Profile -> Settings
Go to: settings -> privacy 
Here you can customize visibility of your basic details such as profile information, status updates, friends, your wall, photos or videos you are tagged in etc. In short, you can adjust your privacy on all of the above elements.

Profile -> Settings
Go to: settings -> general accounts setting
In this section, you can customize your contact details such as your phone number, user name, password and e-mail address. You also can hide your contact details from strangers.

Profile -> Settings
Go to: settings -> timeline and tagging settings
In this section, you can adjust your settings for tagging of photos, who can see your timeline and who can add items to your timeline.

Profile -> Settings
Go to: settings -> blocking
Facebook also offers a unique “block” feature. You can use this feature to block those who are sending you weird messages, posting spam links or are annoying you in any way.

Other security measures

• Do not click on suspicious links.
• Use a unique password for accessing your Facebook account and never disclose it to anyone else.
• Avoid logging into your Facebook account on untrusted networks.
• Just because a link is on Facebook doesn’t mean it is safe avoid clicking on Facebook ads.
• Avoid using third party applications like online data transfer, information exchange, games etc.
• Never forget to logout.
• Share your posts, updates, pictures within your friend circle rather than making it public.

How-To Video: Securing Facebook

New Suicide Prevention Hotline on Facebook

Preventing suicide is everyone’s business. Nearly 100 Americans die by suicide every day, and in the past year, more than eight million Americans 18 or older had thought seriously about suicide.  Suicide in India is slightly above world rate. Of the half million people reported to die of suicide worldwide every year, 20% are Indians, for 17.% of world population. In the last two decades, the suicide rate has increased from 7.9 to 10.3 per 100,000, with very high rates in some southern regions.  Suicide attempts are ten times the suicide completers.   A suicide prevention program is only as effective as its ability to reach people in times of crisis.

As members of a family, a school, business, neighborhood, faith communities, friends, and our government, we all need to work together to solve this problem.  We simply can no longer allow those we live, work and play with to ever believe that suicide is an acceptable solution even in the worst of times.  We have to learn learning about the symptoms of mental illnesses and substance abuse, the warning signs of suicide, how to stand with and support someone who is in crisis, and how to get someone you care about the help they need.  Most of all, we need to be open to talking about these issues in our communities.  Once we begin to support those in need, and whenever possible treat their mental and substance use disorders with the same urgency as any other health condition, we will reduce the rates of suicide, advance health and improve the use of limited health care dollars.

The popularity of suicides (37.8%) in India are by those below the age of 30 years, and 71% of suicides in India are by persons below the age of 44 years. This imposes a huge social, emotional and economic burden.

Facebook, in partnership with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, has introduced features to encourage its users to confidentially report suicidal comments when and where they’re most likely to see them on Facebook.

The new features, available in the U.S. and Canada as of Tuesday, are the equivalent to a suicide hotline for the Facebook generation, where the old-fashioned dial-in is replaced by a Facebook-click-to-report and chat-based counselor outreach system.

If a Facebook member come across a suicidal message in her stream, she can click on the update to report it or fill out a form. S/he’ll then receive an email from Facebook with a link to begin a confidential chat session with a Lifeline crisis worker. The email response will also include the phone number for the free hotline.

It is reported that average handles 70,000 calls per month are receiving by Lifeline. We have heard from our Facebook fans and others that there are many people in crisis who don’t feel comfortable picking up the phone,” Lifeline project director John Draper said. “This new service provides a way for them to get the help they need in the way they want it.”

And when it comes to suicide prevention, being in the right place at the right time is critical. Of course, speed matters too, and this program could drastically accelerate the time between a person’s suicidal comment and potentially life-saving intervention.

Terrorists are using Social Networks Site for their activities

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The new generation terrorists are using online forums viz. Facebook, Mysapce, Orkut, etc. to recruit people who align themselves with the mission of al-Qaeda, creating global networks of terrorists. This pose a growing threat to the world.

Evan Kohlmann, a senior investigator and private consultant for Global Terror Alert, said at the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York that Cyberterrorists are using a series of online forums and at least one social networking site to recruit people to their cause. Many of these people never actually meet in person, but conspire online to launch both cyberterrorist and physical terrorist attacks such as suicide bombings.

Global Terror Alert is an online clearinghouse of information for counterterrorist researchers, analysts and policy-makers.

Social Networking - Safety Tipsp to protect yourself

Social networking Web sites like Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live Spaces are services people can use to connect with others to share information like photos, videos, and personal messages.

As the popularity of these social sites grows, so do the risks of using them. Hackers, spammers, virus writers, identity thieves, and other criminals follow the traffic.

The following tips are helpful to protect from cyber criminals when you use social networks.

1. Use caution when you click links that you receive in messages from your friends on your social Web site. Treat links in messages on these sites as you would links in e-mail messages. (For more information, see Approach links in e-mail with caution.)

2. Don't trust that a message is really from who it says it's from. Hackers can break into accounts and send messages that look like they're from your friends, but aren't. If you suspect that a message is fraudulent, use an alternate method to contact your friend to find out. This includes invitations to join new social networks.

3. To avoid giving away e-mail addresses of your friends, do not allow social networking services to scan your e-mail address book. When you join a new social network, you might receive an offer to enter your e-mail address and password to find out who else is on the network. The site might use this information to send e-mail messages to everyone in your contact list or even everyone you've ever sent an e-mail message to with that e-mail address. Social networking sites should explain that they're going to do this, but some do not.

4. Type the address of your social networking site directly into your browser or use your personal bookmarks. If you click a link to your site through e-mail or another Web site, you might be entering your account name and password into a fake site where your personal information could be stolen.

5. Be selective about who you accept as a friend on a social network. Identity thieves might create fake profiles in order to get information from you. This is known as social engineering.

6.Choose your social network carefully. Evaluate the site that you plan to use and make sure you understand the privacy policy. Find out if the site monitors content that people post. You will be providing personal information to this Web site, so use the same criteria that you would to select a site where you enter your credit card.

7. Assume what you write on a social networking site is permanent. Even if you can delete your account, anyone on the Internet can easily print the information or save it to a computer.

8. Be careful about installing extras on your site. Many social networking sites allow you to download third-party applications that let you do more with your personal page. Criminals sometimes use these applications in order to steal your personal information. To download and use third-party applications safely, take the same safety precautions that you take with any other program or file you download from the Web.

9. Think twice before you use social networking sites at work. For more information, see Be careful with social networking sites, especially at work.

10. Talk to your kids about social networking. If you're a parent of children who use social networking sites, see How to help your kids use social Web sites more safely.