Hard drive with 29,000 Facebook employees data stolen

It’s surprising to the number of events taking place at Facebook concerning private data whether it’s data of employees working at Facebook or data of people using their services but every other day something seems to happen concerning that data. According to a recent Bloomberg report, a hard drive containing the data of 29,000 Facebook employees has been stolen. The Facebook employees data stolen is said to have included some private details as well.

According to Bloomberg, the hard drive had data of thousands of US workers that were employed by Facebook back in 2018. The data included bank account numbers. their names, salaries, bonuses, equity details and most of all even the last four digits of their social security numbers.

The drive is said to have been free of any user data but this is still serious when it comes to Facebook taking care of important data and raises a concern whether Facebook is even equipped to handle so much data of individuals. Facebook has a poor history in protect this data.

The theft is said to have been taken place from an employees car who had the hard drive. Facebook is also said to be a full month late in informing the people affected from this event. The break-in is said to have been occured on November 17th and according to the report, Facebook only realized it on 20th November that the hard drives went missing and only confirmed about them having employee information on 29th of November. With the amount of private data that was stolen on those drives, this should have been much faster process for Facebook of informing the employees.

The company says that it is still working with police to recover the stolen hard drives and is offering its employees two year subscription to an identity theft protection services as well which is good on the company’s part.

A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to bloomberg:

We have seen no evidence of abuse and believe this was a smash and grab crime rather than an attempt to steal employee information,

Facebook says that disciplinary action has been taken against the employee who was in possession of the hard drives since he wasn’t told to transport them and was definitely not suppose to take them out of the office in the first place.

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