In an email sent to its employees last weekend, Facebook said the personal information of about 29,000 employees who have been working in the U.S. since 2018 has been stolen, which is due to hard drives. This data is stored in the car of a Facebook employee who was stolen in a property theft.
The stolen hard drives contain a lot of personal data of Facebook employees, including full name, bank account number, last 4 digits of social security number, payroll, bonus amount, etc. Please note, this data is contained in completely unencrypted files so it can be accessed easily.
The incident happened from November 17, but until November 20, Facebook discovered that the hard drives containing the private data were stolen and that Facebook only reported the case to the individuals. his member.
Facebook said the stolen hard drives contained only information about the company’s employees, not any information related to users of the social network.
Facebook also revealed the employee who was robbed of a car was working at Facebook’s human resources department and had arbitrarily removed the hard drive containing company data from the office without permission. A Facebook spokesperson said the employee would be subject to appropriate disciplinary action.
Facebook is still cooperating with the authorities to find and recover stolen hard drives, but to date there have been no results. There is currently no evidence that the stolen data and information has been posted on the Internet.
“We are working with authorities to investigate a car break-in and steal a Facebook employee bag, containing company equipment with information about the pay of employees are stored on it, ”a Facebook spokesperson said. "We believe this is just a case of breaking a car glass and stealing ordinary things, instead of the main purpose being to steal Facebook employee information."
The incident has led many people to question the security of Facebook, when containing such important and sensitive information on a computer hard drive without encryption. Even many netizens are humorous to ask that even if their employee information that Facebook does not protect, is there any certainty that Facebook will protect users’ information?
