Facebook is again caught in a scandal, after an application from NameTests.com was shown as one of those that published data on 120 million users of the social network. A researcher discovered that one of the applications of that platform disclosed data about 120 million users of the social network Facebook over the course of more than a few days, so we are talking about a huge security problem.
Facebook could have disclosed through this application information about the account ID, full name, spoken language, gender, date of birth, profile picture, devices used, date of the last post, our and friends' pictures, etc. All this information should normally be available only within the Facebook social network, but due to the exploitation of the system that allows the creation of applications, problems of this kind also happen.
Facebook: The application that PUBLISHED the Data of 120 Million People
Facebook divulges information from user accounts by simply accessing this website, made by users, and for 2 months the IT security researcher tested the vulnerability with results in line with expectations. You can see in the video clip above how data could be extracted from Facebook through the method discovered by the developer, and this is how others extracted the data of approximately 120 million people in over 1 year.
"Abusing this flaw, advertisers could have targeted (political) ads based on your Facebook posts and friends. More explicit websites could have abused this flaw to blackmail their visitors, threatening to leak your sneaky search history to your friends.”
Facebook offered the researcher a reward of 4000 dollars for discovering this problem, so you can imagine how much the Americans put on solving the security holes in the network. Although we have been learning about the security problems of the Facebook social network since May, they are still far from over, and as time goes by, we learn more and more details about the data that was extracted from the platform without us knowing it.