Facebook is grappling with another embarrassing data leak with 540 million records found in plain sight on a public Amazon server.
Security researchers from UpGuard found Mexico-based digital media company Cultura Colectiva left more than 540 million records — including comments, likes, reactions, account names and more — stored on the Amazon S3 storage server without a password, allowing anyone to access the data. Another backup file on a separate storage server by defunct California-based app maker At The Pool contained even more sensitive data, including scraped information on over 22,000 users, such as a user’s friends lists, interests, photos, group memberships, and check-ins (including GPS data)
It comes just a year after the Cambridge Analytica leak exposed how unsecure Facebook users’ information is online. The scandal saw more than 87 million Facebook user records scraped without consent by the U.K.-based political data firm. The company was accused of using the data to help build profiles on voters in an effort to help the presidential campaigns for Ted Cruz and later Donald Trump.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pledged to tighten control of users’ personal information but this latest leak shows that the company has not done enough to protect the data or is incapable of doing so.
The latest leak saw databases stored on Amazon cloud servers without any protection and came from a Mexico-based media company called Cultura Colectiva, and another app called “At the Pool.”
Facebook is yet to comment on the latest data leak.
