Stolen information includes full names, email addresses, birthdays
While investigations on the September 28 breach are ongoing, Facebook has informed the National Privacy Commision (NPC) that a total of 775,973 Philippines-based accounts were compromised. In a report from the Philippine News Agency, the affected accounts are sorted into three buckets based on the amount of info that was snooped.
For the first bucket, which consists of 387,322 accounts, basic information such as registered full names, email addresses, and phone numbers were accessed during the breach. The second bucket, which consists of 361,227 accounts, had information such as locations, birthdays, and relationship statuses compromised on top of the basic information.
Lastly, the third tier, consisting of 7,424 accounts, suffered the biggest blow, as posts on their timelines, their list of friends, groups they are members of, and the names of recent Messenger conversations were illegally accessed.
Following Facebook’s findings regarding the said breach, NPC Commissioner Raymund Liboro urges Filipinos to be aware of the risks associated with these breaches. “Data breach notifications for data subjects are for their [the hacker’s] benefit; we must provide as much information as possible to assist the affected data subjects to brace for its impact,” Liboro said.
The September 28 data breach was caused by an exploit in the vulnerabilities of Facebook’s “View As” feature. Facebook has disabled this feature after the data breach was discovered.
