Meta engineer creates shadow program to stalk private feeds, covertly downloads 30,000 images
A rogue Meta worker is being investigated by the London Metropolitan police’s cybercrime unit for downloading users’ private Facebook images.
The engineer, who has since been sacked, is alleged to have designed a program to access pictures while avoiding internal security checks, UK court documents show.
While the incident happened over a year ago, it has only just come to light, following various bail hearings.
A specialist detective from the Metropolitan Police’s cybercrime unit is investigating the alleged mass invasion of Facebook users’ privacy.
Meta confirms insider breach
Meta has confirmed that the suspected breach was discovered more than a year ago, and the company itself referred the matter to police in the UK.
“After discovering improper access by an employee over a year ago, we immediately terminated the individual, notified users, referred the matter to law enforcement, and enhanced our security measures,” Meta told the Press Association.
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The engineer, who lives in London, is currently on police bail and is not allowed to leave the country while the criminal investigation continues.
Court documents from Highbury Magistrates Court in North London show that the engineer is accused of developing a software program designed to harvest private user media in a way that bypassed Meta’s automated auditing systems.
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The accused's intent and the code they created have not yet been disclosed, and it is not known whether the code was shared with external parties.
Last May, Cybernews reported that attackers claimed to have scraped a 1.2 billion user record database from Facebook by abusing one of its application programming interfaces (APIs). Meta did not deny the scrape taking place.
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