6 ms·
>The hard drives, which were unencrypted, included payroll data like employee names, bank account numbers and the last four digits of employees’ social security
by Cookingboy 7y ago
>The hard drives, which were unencrypted, included payroll data like employee names, bank account numbers and the last four digits of employees’ social security numbers, according to an email Facebook shared with staff Friday morning. The drives also included compensation information, including salaries, bonus amounts, and some equity details.
How did information like that get on unencrypted local hard drives in the first place?
Sure leaving it in a car is bad, but this stuff shouldn't be left around anywhere, not even an employee's home.
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoPlaintext storage of PII data should be punishable with prison. Time to stop ducking and dodging in terms of responsibility.
- abakker 7y agoAlternative: just do mandatory minimum payouts to the people's info was stored wrong.
- huntertwo 7y agoThe only explanation I can come up with is that it was so much data that it couldn't be moved over the Internet in the time span they needed it moved. But that explanation only leaves me with more questions.
- Cookingboy 7y agoIt's payroll information for 28000 employees, not 4K HD videos of their entire childhood, how much data can that possibly be?
- KaiserPro 7y agoUSB thumb driver big. Perhaps it was on a laptop?
- alias_neo 7y agoLet's put it into perspective. If they had 100MB on each employee, you could fit it on a 3TB HDD. As it was payroll, if was probably in the kilobytes per employee, but let's say they had a whole megabyte on each employee. That's ~28GB. I can store about 10 times that on the phone im sending this from. Really though it was probably closer to 2.8GB in total. In other words, it was likely a tiny, tiny amount of data in the grand scheme of things. It was probably on a laptop or some external storage for convenience.
- jkaptur 7y agoExcel.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> Excel I have Excel documents on my SSD. They're still protected by, at the very least, whole-disk encryption.
- smt88 7y agoExcel supports encryption[1], as does whatever operating system was used to prepare these drives. The question is, why was someone moving a physical storage device with sensitive data on it without being smart or careful enough to encrypt it? 1. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/protect-an-excel-file-7359d4ae-7213-4ac2-b058-f75e9311b599 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/protect-an-excel-fi...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- unlinked_dll 7y agoI'm sitting here wondering why a Facebook employee is exfiltrating a good chunk of data on physical media outside the office, which presumably would be accessible remotely if they needed it offsite.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- newnewpdro 7y agoIncompetence, negligence, combination of the two... on the HR/finance side of business there's a lot of reckless handling of information.
- gazelle21 7y agoCan confirm. I was talking to an HR person onetime at an old company, she was throwing away a bunch of applications with people's SS numbers. All it would take would be someone looking through the trash, and they used an outside company for janitorial services.