Report Says Recent Facebook Leak Was Not Political

• A news report was published by the Wall Street Journal detailing the purpose behind the recent Facebook data leak.
• Around 30 million users had their accounts compromised after their Facebook tokens were stolen.
• The motive behind the leak was to sell ads, and the attack was not politically guided.

Facebook and controversy go hand in hand going by recent events. It all started with the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the social media company being accused of manipulating past GDPR rules, the rampant increase in fake news on the platform, and finally, a recently discovered data leak that has affected around 30 million users across the globe.

A news report by Wall Street Journal revealed that the recent account leak that affected tens of millions of Facebook users was not politically influenced. Instead, it was led by a digital marketing company that wanted to make money through deceptive advertising. Facebook has not commented on the matter officially, and the details about the attackers have not been revealed.

The attack was first disclosed by the social media company towards the end of September after the platform realized that millions of user tokens were stolen. The digital tokens are used to gain account access for their respective profiles. The platform has already re-issued new tokens which should prevent attackers from gaining access to data anymore but the damage has already been done to users.

Facebook recently detailed the impact of the attack revealing “For 15 million people, attackers accessed two sets of information – name and contact details (phone number, email, or both, depending on what people had on their profiles). For 14 million people, the attackers accessed the same two sets of information, as well as other details people had on their profiles.”

Despite knowing that the attackers were not politically motivated, it does not help raise people’s confidence in the platform. With the website already being compromised with politically influential campaigns by Russian-state campaigners during the 2016 US elections, security on the platform is not at its best at the moment.

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