Facebook had a major security issue this month, with the company revealing to terrorists the identities of employees who were meant to keep them under surveillance. More specifically, Facebook revealed the identities of employees from various departments who used the software to moderate inappropriate content published within the social network.
The Facebook security problem affected no less than 1000 people from 22 departments of the company. All these people used Facebook software to moderate various types of posts that contained sexual material, racist or similar expressions, plus terrorist propaganda published by various terrorist organizations.
It seems that a bug in Facebook's software was discovered and exploited, displaying the identities of employees when administrators were deleting Facebook groups. The administrators who were not deleted by the Facebook employees and remained in the groups, received a notification, just like any other in the group, which also contained the profile with the identity of the employee who moderated.
Facebook showed the identities of the employees to the terrorists
Among the 1000 employees who moderated various people on the Facebook social network, only 40 were part of a group designed to identify and delete terrorist propaganda. This Facebook anti-terrorist team was working in Dublin, Ireland, and 6 of them were marked as having a high risk of being attacked by terrorists after they saw their profiles and real identities.
One of the affected Facebook employees is a young Iraqi who left Ireland after 7 people suspected of being part of a terrorist group in Egypt accessed his profile. The interesting part is that the people who were in charge of moderation on Facebook were not employees of the company, but contracted to do this work.
"We care deeply about keeping everyone who works for Facebook safe. As soon as we learned about the issue, we fixed it and began a thorough investigation to learn as much as possible about what happened."
Although 6 people with a high risk of being attacked by terrorists were identified, those from Facebook only offered to install alarms in their homes and transport them to work and back home. Facebook has solved the security problem in the meantime, but that won't keep people safe if terrorists decide to attack them for what they did.
