Over 500 Million Facebook Records Exposed On Amazon Cloud Servers

The last year for Facebook hasn’t been easy, and a new data leak has only added to those headaches.

Cybersecurity firm UpGuard revealed on Wednesday that 540 million Facebook user records were exposed to the public on Amazon’s cloud servers. These records included account names, reactions, likes and comments that were up on the servers until only recently.

Chris Vickery, the UpGuard’s director of cyber risk research, pointed out that the data was likely gathered through Facebook’s integration ability.

Facebook integration allows for app and website developers to integrate a user’s Facebook profile as a means of signing in. Google is another tech giant that allows for integration by simplifying the sign-in process.

However, Vickery told CNN Business that this leak "highlights a problem that is intrinsic with mass data collection" and that there is "no way of guaranteeing the safe storage of the data of their end users if they are going to allow app developers to harvest it in mass."

One app UpGuard talks about is the now-defunct "At The Pool" app that was described as a cross between Match.com and Meetup. Despite the app going defunct in 2014, 22,000 users’ names, passwords, and emails were saved and exposed as a result of this. UpGuard wasn’t able to say how long it was exposed.

"Facebook's policies prohibit storing Facebook information in a public database," Facebook said in a statement.

“Once alerted to the issue, we worked with Amazon to take down the databases. We are committed to working with the developers on our platform to protect people's data."