Latest cybersecurity reporting from selected sources.

WhatsApp will introduce usernames later this year, letting its 3 billion users connect without sharing phone numbers. WhatsApp has over three billion users, and it’s finally letting them talk to each other without exchanging phone numbers. The company announced this week that usernames are coming later this year, and reservations are open now. The problem […]

WhatsApp is finally allowing users to reserve usernames, a privacy feature that lets them hide their phone numbers from people not in their contact list. [...]

WhatsApp on Monday officially announced the start of global reservations of usernames with an aim to protect the privacy of more than three billion users on the messaging platform

Researchers compiled a list of 3.5 billion WhatsApp mobile phone numbers and associated personal information by abusing a contact-discovery API that lacked rate limiting. [...]

Two-day exploit opened up 3.5 billion users to myriad potential harms Researchers in Austria used a flaw in WhatsApp to gather the personal data of more than 3.5 billion users in what they believe amounts to the "largest data leak in history."…

German Court Rebuffs Consumer Group Bid for InjunctionMeta can use the public posts of European Instagram and Facebook users to train its artificial intelligence models starting Tuesday after a German court rejected an injunction against the company. The court said Meta has a "legitimate interest" in processing the data.

All Risk, No Reward: Meta's Ongoing Legal Issues in EuropeSocial media giant Meta is likely to face more legal hurdles over its plans to use the personal data of European Facebook and Instagram users to train artificial intelligence models. Meta paused efforts to train AI with European data in June 2024.

European Commission Also Fines Apple 500 Million EurosEuropean regulators said Facebook conducted an end run around privacy regulations by requiring users to pay a monthly subscription fee or else accept that their personal data would be fed to advertisers. The European Commission fined the social media giant 200 million euros.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Meta €251 million ($263.6M) over General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) violations arising from a 2018 personal data breach impacting 29 million Facebook accounts. [...]

Meta has been fined 21.62 billion won ($15.67 million) by South Korea's data privacy watchdog for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with advertisers without their consent

Europe's top court has ruled that Meta Platforms must restrict the use of personal data harvested from Facebook for serving targeted ads even when users consent to their information being used for advertising purposes, a move that could have serious consequences for ad-driven companies operating in the region

A threat actor leaked 200,000 records on a hacker forum, claiming they contained the mobile phone numbers, email addresses, and other personal information of Facebook Marketplace users. [...]

Facebook and other social media companies struggle with trust, with only 6% globally comfortable sharing personal data, according to a 2024 Thales survey

Time for a proper secure clinical image transfer system, perhaps? Staff at NHS Lanarkshire - which serves over half a million Scottish residents - used WhatsApp to swap photos and personal info about patients, including children's names and addresses.…

Patients’ personal data was shared on the app for years

Facebook's parent company Meta has been fined a record $1.3 billion by European Union data protection regulators for transferring the personal data of users in the region to the U.S

Three different threat actors leveraged hundreds of elaborate fictitious personas on Facebook and Instagram to target individuals located in South Asia as part of disparate attacks

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) on Thursday imposed fresh fines of €5.5 million against Meta's WhatsApp for violating data protection laws when processing users' personal information

Facebook, Insta told to pay up, make changes to data slurping process within 3 months A legal saga between Meta, Ireland and the European Union has reached a conclusion – at least for now – that forces the social media giant to remove data consent requirements from its terms of service in favor of explicit consent, and subjects it to a few hundred million more euros in fines for the trouble. …

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Meta a total of €390 million after finding that it forced Facebook and Instagram users to consent to personal data processing for targeted advertising. [...]