Khaberni - "Meta", the owner of "Facebook", revealed a serious security breach discovered more than a year ago.
The case concerns an engineer who was employed by the company at the time, suspected of downloading about 30,000 private images of "Facebook" users, after designing a special program that enabled him to bypass the company's internal security scanning systems.
"Meta" did not just fire the employee upon discovery of the incident, but informed the affected users, strengthened its security systems, and referred the file to the judicial authorities in Britain.
Consequently, a specialist investigator from the Cybercrime Unit of the British Capital's Police initiated a criminal investigation with the engineer residing in London, who was released on bail to report back to the police in May, with the requirement to provide prior notification of any travel abroad.
According to court documents viewed by the British News Agency, the police confirm that the engineer created a script specifically designed to circumvent "Meta's" internal detection systems, allowing him to access and download the images.
"Meta", through an official spokesperson, confirmed that protecting user data is its utmost priority, emphasizing its full cooperation with the ongoing investigation.
However, this incident is not the first of its kind. In 2018, the "Facebook" app suffered a glitch affecting about 6.8 million users, and in 2024 "Meta" was fined 91 million euros in Ireland for storing millions of passwords as plain, unencrypted text.
This case comes just weeks after "Meta" and "Google" were condemned by a court in Los Angeles for failing to protect their users from harm, in a ruling related to a woman's addiction to social media since her childhood, which could change the way these platforms are managed in the future.
