Ireland slaps Meta with $263 million fine for data breach that hacked 29M Facebook accounts

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) on Tuesday fined Meta $263 million over data protection failure that led to the hacking of over 29 million Facebook accounts globally.

“The failure to build in data protection requirements throughout the design and development cycle can expose individuals to very serious risks and harms, including a risk to the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals,” said Graham Doyle, DCP’s head of communications.

“By allowing unauthorised exposure of profile information, the vulnerabilities behind this breach caused a grave risk of misuse of these types of data,” he added.

What happened?

In 2018, Meta reported a security breach that compromised over 29 million Facebook accounts all over the world. Of the 29 million accounts, three million belonged to users based in Europe.

A flaw in Facebook’s video-uploading feature led hackers to access several accounts on the social media platform.

The personal data involved included email addresses, phone numbers, locations, and places of work, date of birth, religion, gender, posts on timelines, groups of which a user was a member and children’s personal data.

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Meta Ireland and its US parent company remedied the breach shortly after its discovery, the DPC said and reported the issue to the regulator in September 2018.

Meta fined in Sept too

In September, the DPC fined Meta 91 million euros for failing to put measures in place to protect users’ password data and for taking too long to alert the regulator of the issue.

An inquiry was launched in April 2019 after Meta Ireland informed the regulator that it had “inadvertently stored certain passwords of social media users” in a readable format on its internal system, the DPC said in a statement.

Doyle told AFP that the breach, which took place in January 2019, affected 36 million Facebook and Instagram users across the European Economic Area, which comprises the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

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With inputs from agencies