Research firm UpGuard has announced that tech giant Facebook’s developers left millions of user records exposed to the public domain on cloud servers. They say that more than 540 million records, sizing 146 GB that included user activity, account names and IDs were found on these cloud servers.
According to UpGuard, it is not yet clear how this data became publicly available. They also claim that they found personal information including 22,000 passwords that are used for their apps.
UpGuard further added that the data set was found on Amazon’s cloud servers and was immediately removed after Facebook was contacted. They say that after Facebook was alerted, the tech giant worked with Amazon to store the information back safely.
As per UpGuard, Facebook’s data has been spread far and wide which makes it difficult for the tech giant to control it at scale. As a result, they say that if this data grows in magnitude with time, there are chances that such incidents may happen far too often.
Market experts claim that cloud providers must be wary of such incidents since it can hamper their reputation in the market. However, business entities are taking measures to prevent data spillage by launching products and services, just as Zscaler did with their service called ‘Exact Data Match’.