Facebook and LinkedIn have both suffered massive data breaches, exposing the details of more than 533 million and 500 million user accounts respectively, it has been revealed.

Extensive leaked data from Facebook was reportedly found online by security researcher Alon Gal – including the personal information of 11 million UK users such as phone numbers, locations, birth dates and many email addresses.

It’s believed that the ‘hack’ may relate to a bug in Facebook’s friend-adding ‘Contact Importer’ tool which was fixed in September 2019. Previous breaches in 2017 fell before the introduction of GDPR, which Facebook argues absolved it of responsibility to notify users.

Questions still hover over the LinkedIn breach in particular, with the company claiming much of their data appears to have been aggregated from other sources, or (like Facebook) were perhaps not technically ‘hacked’ at all – but scraped in bulk from publicly visible parts of the popular professional website.

The huge cache of Linkedin data was thought to be on sale, after security researches found a 2 million user ‘sample’ advertised online.

A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters the social media platform will not inform users if their accounts were part of the breach, and Linkedin are yet to issue a statement on this point – although given that LinkedIn has around 740 million accounts in total, a clear majority of its users are likely affected.

Users of both platforms can check if their email addresses (and now phone numbers) were likely breached via either platform over at: https://haveibeenpwned.com/ – and are advised to update passwords as a precaution.

For IT Support and cybersecurity expertise, please contact our team today.

Bletchley Park, the historic home of Britain’s WW2 codebreakers, will receive a £1m donation from Facebook to help it survive financial difficulties.

The Buckinghamshire country house and grounds, now a museum, was the secret home of allied cryptographers who famously cracked the Enigma and Lorenz ciphers during the Second World War.

Facing an income shortfall of around £2m due to falling visitor numbers during lockdown, the Bletchley Park Trust, which is a registered charity, was facing extensive redundancies – some of which will now be avoided.

In a statement, Facebook said the heritage site was a ‘birthplace of modern computing’, and acknowledged the important strategic role the wartime location played in shortening the war.

Bletchley was home to a number of famous mathematicians, linguists and other intellectuals working in secret on behalf of the war effort, including Alan Turing – now considered the father of modern computing – Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander and others. At its peak, almost 10,000 personnel, around 75% of which were women, worked as part of Bletchley’s operation, who remained bound by the Official Secrets Act until at least the 1970s.

The National Computing Museum, based at Bletchley, is also home to a replica of the Colossus Mark 2, lovingly rebuilt by volunteers: the world’s first ‘programmable’ electronic, digital computer.

You can learn more about Bletchley Park, and support the trust here.

Facebook have announced the testing of a new news filter in France, designed to stop fake news or deeply misleading stories from being shared online via social media.

The announcement comes only two months from the first round of voting in the French Presidential Election.

Under the new filter, dubious news stories flagged by Facebook users will be double checked against eight leading French media outlets, including Le Monde, Agency France-Presse and Liberation. Should any two of the eight provide evidence of ‘fake news,’ the story will be flagged as ‘disputed’ in Facebook’s News feed.

Users will receive a warning before sharing ‘disputed’ stories and will be blocked from using paid advertising to promote ‘disputed’ stories.

In addition, Le Monde and Liberation are believed to have begun compiling their own databases of unreliable fake news websites – which may eventually be used in a similar way to more advanced antivirus companies’ watchlists already used to isolate suspicious phishing websites.

The move comes just months after social media giants Facebook and Twitter faced widespread criticism for the proliferation of fake news websites using false stories or invented facts to promote political agenda during the 2016 US Presidential Elections.

For IT Security support or assistance, contact Lineal today: 01271 375999

Facebook have announced that Facebook Pages will soon allow online sales, in a move expected to be welcomed by online businesses.

The popular social media website could potentially offer organisations access to the largest marketplace in the world, after Facebook recently made headlines for over 1 billion active users in the space of 24 hours. The competition is also likely to be fierce however, with over 45 million pages already in existence vying for attention.

Facebook pages currently include an option for a ‘Call to Action’ button like this one, allowing visitors to ‘Contact Us’, ‘Sign Up’, with similar ‘Donate’ options for non-profits, which will all receive a redesign.

Over the next month however, Pages will be granted access to new ‘Shopping’ and ‘Services’ sections, allowing a business to showcase their products for purchase or a range of professional services for hire. Additionally, Facebook are understood to be testing a voice-activated AI ‘assistant’ service, ‘M’, for both Facebook and the Facebook Messenger App, keeping pace with similar offerings from other giants of the tech world.

It would be a brave business which moved to Facebook sales alone, although some startups may attempt just that, eventually processing all payments through social media as a replacement for a traditional website.

But as the old saying goes: ‘Where there’s crowds, there’s business.’ A conventional internet banner advert is clicked-on merely 0.1% of the time, or one in a thousand views, perhaps tempting internet savvy companies to move more of their efforts to Facebook, a website millions of users log into (willingly) each day.

If you need technology to drive sales for your business, why not get in touch with Lineal? Contact us here: http://www.lineal.co.uk/contact/