Rabindranath Choubey, a Mathematics teacher in Ranchi called us a few days back and updated that for years Facebook was involved in a data breach. This data breach compromised at least 50 million users’ personal data. This vulnerability was exposed to Facebook in July 2017, but Facebook only became aware of it in September 2018 when they realized a spike in the unusual activity. In other words, Facebook was not ready to accept the vulnerability, or never acknowledge the seriousness of the vulnerability, or had no proper strategy to answer the vulnerability, or had no technology bandwidth to manage such vulnerability. Understanding the situation, we can only say that Facebook could have arrested the attack if they were prepared to understand the vulnerability. Facebook would have arrested the data breach, if vulnerability testing had been conducted on a frequent basis, The data breach would have been exposed much in advance, if Facebook had culture of cyber security.
We’ll continue to see the democratization of hacking. It used to belong only to those with specialized technical skills. With the growing communities on the dark web advanced hacking techniques have become productized, packaged, and sold. Hacking tools have supply chains as sophisticated as any industry. Now even people with basic skills can buy tools that employ advanced hacking techniques, greatly expanding the number of potential threats in the world. At the same time as more data moves to the web and more data gets monetized the incentive to hack continues to increase. Mark Herschberg, CTO of Averon
It will be wrong to blame Facebook or any other organization that has been a victim of cyber-attack. It is a known fact that governments, businesses, or individual irrespective of their cyber security preparedness may end up becoming a victim of cyber-attack at some point in their lifespan. The only good news is governments, businesses, and individuals are aware of the cyber-attack challenges and are exploring the avenues to overcome it. We know that it is not an easy task for any government, organization or individual to win all the battles at all the time, but it is important to be prepare for it. This task is not easy as technology is perpetually evolving, and with evolving technology, art and science of cybercrime is also evolving.
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