On social media, beware of personal data leakage

• Author: MOHAMMED ZAINABI - L'OBSERVATEUR DU MAROC
• Published date: 22 April 2021
• Date: 22 April 2021

The latest one was revealed on the 3rd of April, after 533 million Facebook users in 106 countries got their personal data leaked and published for free online by hackers. Their full names, their phone numbers and even their Facebook ids were revealed in the process. Same thing happened for the addresses, the birth dates, the biographies and email addresses of those affected by the cyber-attack.

Many celebrities are said to be among the victims of this attack, even Mark Zuckerberg himself, as suggested in this tweet.

The author of this tweet revealed that Mark Zuckerberg uses a special app with an end-to-end encryption program, which does not belong to Facebook to protect his personal data. Nevertheless, it did not stop his personal data from being leaked. To back up his finding, this Twitter user shared Zuckerberg's phone number and his Facebook account information. Also among the victims, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, the European Union Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders alongside 61 members of the Federal Trade Commission and 651 Attorneys General.

Red alert

This new scandal revives the controversy surrounding the weak protection of our personal data. Especially after the alert was sounded by the technical director of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, which revealed the leak, Alon Gal. This expert said that the content that each user publicly posts could provide valuable information to cyber criminals who use this same personal information to impersonate people. "Hackers can also go as far as to appropriate their login credentials", he warns.

In some countries, authorities quickly reacted. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for example announced five days ago that it has started investigating in order to determine whether Facebook had violated data protection rules or not. The DPC, the equivalent in Morocco of The National Control Commission for the Protection of Personal Data (CNDP), considers that this leak could constitute a violation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If the Irish regulator proves Facebook guilty, the company could face a financial penalty of up to 4% of its global turnover.

The European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, approves with DPC's reaction in this tweet and says he intends to coordinate with them, probably to carry out a similar action in Europe. He also asks Facebook to be careful with personal data.

Reacting to the new storm created online by this...