Meta fined Rs 2239 crore in data breach case, hackers took advantage of bug to break into accounts
EU: Ireland's Data Protection Commission imposed the fine after completing its investigation into the breach. In this breach, hackers took advantage of a bug in Facebook's code to gain access to user accounts. This helped hackers steal the digital key, known as an access token.
The European Union's privacy watchdog imposed a fine on Monday of Rs 2,239 crore (251 million euros) on Meta, the company that owns social media platform Facebook. The fine was imposed following an investigation into Facebook's 2018 data breach, which affected millions of accounts. Ireland's Data Protection Commission imposed the fine after completing its investigation into the breach. In this breach, hackers took advantage of a bug in Facebook's code to gain access to user accounts. This helped hackers steal the digital key, known as an access token.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission is Meta's main privacy regulator under the European Union's strict 27-nation privacy regime, and its regional headquarters is in Dublin. "The decision relates to an incident from 2018. As soon as we became aware of this problem, we fixed it and notified both people who could have been affected and regulators including the IDPC," Meta said in a statement. It will appeal against this decision.
The regulator said that when it first disclosed the data leak, Facebook claimed that 5 crore accounts were affected. But the actual number was about 2.9 crore, including 3 million accounts in Europe. The company has said that after the bug was discovered, the FBI had alerted regulators in the US and Europe.
