When doing my research on recent data breaches I came across this article The Top 10 Data Breaches of 2021, which had some data breaches that I had little or no knowledge of happening. The one data breach that stuck out to me that I did have some knowledge on was the Facebook leak. This breach of data or leaked database effected nearly 533 million accounts. The data breached included Facebook users from 106 countries with more than 32 million records from users located in the U.S., 11 million records from U.K. users and 6 million records from users in India. (Henriquez, 2021) This breach resulted in millions of user's emails and phone numbers to be leaked which could result into profile hacks and password resets which is a massive security concern for Facebook. From what security researcher Alon Gal stated, "A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook's users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social-engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts." (Henriquez, 2021). Clearly Facebook remains as one of the top social media applications in use today, however you can't help but ask the question with a company that has an information leak of 533 million users what are the long-term damages? What will Facebook be liable for, or will they be liable? When will the customers trust run out? All interesting questions that come from a huge data breach.
Henriquez, M. (2021, December 9). The top data breaches of 2021. Security Magazine RSS. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the- top-data-breaches-of-2021