Facebook will sue former employee Alexander Solonchenko for allegedly stealing personal data from more than 178 million users. The social network accuses Solonchenko of having abused a Messenger feature that allows importing and associating telephone contacts with existing accounts on that platform.
The case reports that the former employee will have used an automatic tool to generate telephone numbers that were later associated with existing profiles. Whenever the social network returned a positive result, Solonchenko collected the user’s available personal data.
The scheme will have been conducted between January 2018 and September 2019. The data was later sold on the black market, in December 2020. Facebook reports that Solonchenko carried out a similar attack with the records of a large Ukrainian bank.
The American giant believes that inestimable and irreparable damage was caused.
This is not the biggest incident of its kind. In the past, a group of hackers managed to appropriate the personal data of 533 million users through a similar system. The legal effort being made by Facebook also serves to signal and deter future attacks.
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