TechCrunch recently broke the news about yet another colossal data leak that affects millions of Facebook users. The online tech news website reported that a popular quiz app called Nametests.com might have unintentionally leaked sensitive data of roughly 120 million Facebook users. Before we continue, we wanted to highlight the scale of the leak by clarifying that the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal that shook the world a few months ago involved the details of only 87 million people.
The leak was spotted by a young ethical hacker who stumbled upon personal information of Facebook users that had been left exposed and readily available to third parties to examine and use. People’s personal details have been leaked the moment they launch the app to take a personality quiz on the Nametests.com Facebook app. The cybersecurity activist said that the data might have been exposed for more than two years.
The leak has affected the details of everyone who has taken a personality test owned by Nametests.com on Facebook. Such tests may have included ‘What is your sexy nickname based on your photo?’ and ‘What does your facial analysis have to say about your personality?’ and ‘Which Disney princess are you?’. The Belgian hacker who found the leak said that ‘the website behind the quizzes, recently fixed a flaw that publicly exposed information of their more than 120 million monthly users — even after they deleted the app.’ The leaked data included names, DOB, images, status updates, and more.
Nametests.com were not aware of the issue, and they worked to resolve it immediately after it was brought to their attention. Nametests.com is a Facebook application that has been around for years. The app is owned by a European company called Social Sweethearts. The German company market themselves as global digital publishers of individualized content and claim to have 250 million registered users and nearly 3 billion monthly users.
Social Sweethearts said in a statement to POLITICO that there is “no evidence that personal data of users was disclosed to unauthorized third parties and all the more that there was no evidence that it had been misused.” However, the Belgian cybersecurity activist highlighted the fact that it would have been almost impossible for Nametests.com to find any evidence of data misuse, as the data has been available through simple website monitoring. It is currently unknown if the leaked data has been misused.
Facebook continues to walk on thin ice as they just patented a system that can use your cellphone’s mic to monitor your TV habits which raises a whole lot of privacy questions; their data was misused and allegedly influenced the last presidential US elections; and a few weeks ago we reported on a data leak that affected roughly 3 million Facebook users.
Facebook is still working hard on terminating the existence of apps that might be abusing their data; developed a more transparent way of advertising and now allow everyone to see in real time all ads that are running globally on the social media platform; and even started a data abuse bounty where they reward cyber experts who manage to find evidence of Facebook data abuse. Facebook made an $8,000 donation to Freedom of the Press Foundation as a request by the white hat hacker who brought the Nametests.com leak to their attention.
Panda Security reminds you always to have software that can help you get rid of apps you do not use, and can assist you in cleaning potentially unwanted files.
Panda Security specializes in the development of endpoint security products and is part of the WatchGuard portfolio of IT security solutions. Initially focused on the development of antivirus software, the company has since expanded its line of business to advanced cyber-security services with technology for preventing cyber-crime.
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24 comments
VIVIANE
Thanks for this information … you are great … i mean it !
Thanks a lot, Andreas!!
Kind regards,
Panda Security.
Thank you for keeping my computer and details safe.
Thanks for your feedback, Leonie!
We will keep working hard to ensure our customers have the best cybersecurity solutions.
Kind regards,
Panda Security.
Thanks for your feedback, Leonie!
We will keep working hard to ensure our customers have the best cybersecurity solutions.
Kind regards,
Panda Security.
Facebook was recently caught of data leak. Somehow data was leaking from facebook. I also came across this news recently. You always must be aware of your data. It should be highly protected. CEO of Facebook was responsible for the data leak and he was sorry for it.
Every global corporation collects every piece of data you ever inputted into social media, the nsa records every keystroke and action of every computer on the planet, (they got devices on the underwater cables that connect USA to UK, of which about 50% of traffic flows through, they also got things that monitor the data in the ashburn virginia data center that is responsible for 70% of all internet traffic), microsoft records everything if you use windows, google records everything if you use chrome, apple records everything if you use osx. What do they do with the data? They sell it to whomever wants it, doesnt matter who, a pedophile looking for kids, a muslim religious police looking for christians or jews, a government looking to enslave its people (china, EU is next, if hillary was in the US would be next too). From this data they can gauge your intelligence level(what books youve read and therefore what knowledge you could possibly have), your influence, your habits, your perversions(google incognito still tracks), your political affiliation. Social media makes money by selling your data, cambridge analytica is absolutely nothing compared to the bots the globalists use. Cambridge analytica is being attacked for one reason and one reason only, they took a contract to help conservatives (bannon took out the contract). The left used 20 times more bot and shilling companies, eric schimdt the head of alphabet group (owns google) was in wikileaks grovelling to hillary clinton about how they will start using searches that lead people to hillary or censor anything bad about hillary https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36828 . Can we please stop acting like these data breaches arent just an excuse for why every global corporation on earth(and basically anyone that wants to pay) has all the data. They blame it on some leak that they prolly orchestrated on themselves, in order to have plausible deniability about why data was found at some random company (they all got your data). The companies should be paying us for our data, or giving us a cut of what they sold, or just outright not collecting data.
Mille grazie x l’informazione.
Grazie per averci letto!
Saluti,
Panda Security.
It is really bad news and more than 120 million data leaked.
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That’s why I do not use facebook.
Facebook is one of the worst sites at this time.
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That is the reason I was thinking why my FB account got hacked out of nowhere. Also, may of my known reported their facebook accounts getting hacked. Is there a way to recover it as it does not recognize my email or my phone number?