Not only users, even Facebook employees are exposed to personal data: Information located on unencrypted hard drives, stolen nearly 1 month to be notified

The personal banking information of tens of thousands of Facebook employees in the US was violated last month when a thief stole several hard drives from a company employee’s car.

According to the email sent by the social networking giant to the affected people on December 13, the hard drives are not encrypted and contain payroll data such as employee names, bank account numbers, last 4 digits of social security book. Besides information about salaries, bonuses and some equity details.

A spokesman confirmed that the total number of stolen hard drives contained the personal data of about 29,000 Facebook employees in the US in 2018. However, they did not contain the data of Facebook users. In the past few years, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has faced many scandals related to the disclosure of personal data of users, which greatly affected the company’s reputation. And the incident has shown their carelessness in protecting employees’ data.

Personal data of 29,000 Facebook employees in the US was stolen since November 17.

A spokesman told Bloomberg: “We have been working with law enforcement to investigate a car break-in and steal a person’s work bag for Facebook, which stores some information about Facebook employee salaries and bank accounts. Initial investigations showed no evidence of data misuse, but rather an ordinary and unintentional theft of company employees’ information. ”

According to internal emails, the theft occurred on November 17 and it took until November 20 for Facebook to recognize a number of stolen hard drives. On November 29, the survey results confirmed that they included payroll information for 29,000 US employees. And it wasn’t until December 13, nearly a month after the incident, that Facebook announced and issued a warning to the affected people.

The owner of the hacked car is an employee of Facebook’s administrative and personnel department and is said to have taken the hard drive out of the office without permission. A spokesman for the company said it had taken appropriate disciplinary action for this person to set an example for others and insisted it was an unintended incident and not a malicious intent with the data. .

So far, Facebook is still working with law enforcement to recover lost information because they haven’t found the stolen hard drive. In emails to employees exposed, Facebook recommends that they notify their bank of the incident. In addition, the company provides them with a free credit theft monitoring service for two years. However, many people believe that this action is “losing cattle to make cages” and worried that the loss of information could affect Facebook employees in a certain way in the future.