Facebook faces £1bn fine over hack attack

FACEBOOK’S problems deepened last night as EU regulators opened a formal investigation into a hack of 50million accounts and a new threat of legal action in the UK also loomed.

The Irish Data Protection Commissioner, the regulator responsible for overseeing the company’s European data compliance, confirmed last night that it was investigating the biggest attack yet to hit a social media company, which could result in a fine of €1.4 billion (£1.2 billion).

Around 10 per cent of accounts affected are believed to be European.

Meanwhile, Facebook users in the UK who were among the millions of people to have their data compromised due to the site’s design flaws could claim thousands in compensation.

Irvine Thanvi Natas (ITN) Solicitors is representing dozens of people who say that Facebook misused their personal data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year. It is now preparing to expand its legal challenge against the firm and said the true scale of the new data breach “could be huge”.

The company said that hackers exploited software flaws to steal “access tokens”, which are the equivalent of digital keys that enable people to automatically log back into the social network.

Facebook said its investigation into the security breach, which forced it to log out 90million users as a security precaution, found no evidence of hackers tampering with third party apps linked to users’ accounts.

Users at risk were logged out of their accounts and shown a message at the top of their feed to let them know they may have been affected.

“There are a vast amount of people affected by this,” said Ravi Naik, a partner at ITN Solicitors.

“We are already acting for a group of individuals against Facebook over their privacy policies and potential data breaches. This is a continuation of that same pattern of concern.”

The legal action follows a similar claim in the US, launched last week hours after the social media giant conceded that hackers could have accessed millions of users’ data through a security hole that remained open for over a year. A second claim against Facebook was also proposed in Canada.