Another Facebook security flop exposed, and it’s not entirely their fault

Not long after Facebook’s password storing issue, Facebook has yet again in the centre of attention after an Australian cybersecurity firm UpGuard found out that 540 million Facebook users’ data were stored in public databases on Amazon.com Inc’s cloud servers.

According to a report from Reuters, UpGuard’s Cyber Risk team posted on their blog stating that Mexican-based news website Cultura Colectiva has stored 540 million records on Facebook users in a public database, exposing information which includes identification numbers, comments, reactions and account names.

Cultura Colectiva responded in a statement that the information came from users who has interacted with three separate Facebook pages and it’s the same information that is already publicly accessible for everyone.

They claimed that no sensitive or private data such as emails and passwords were stored because they don’t have access to that kind of data. Therefore, they’ve not put their users’ privacy and security at risk.

In a separate database, a Facebook app named At The Pool was reported to have stored names, passwords and email addresses of 22,000 Facebook users. The app was shut down way back in 2014 but the data remains in the server.

In response, Facebook said that they have worked with Amazon to take down the databases immediately. They mentioned that Facebook strongly prohibits storing information in public databases.

Just weeks ago, Facebook was exposed for storing user passwords in a readable format for years, which is accessible for 20,000 employees in the company. However, Facebook claimed that the passwords were not abused by anyone.

After the series of security blunders, is Facebook still trustable?