F’BOOK FIRES SNOOP
Cyberstalk staffer
Facebook has fired a security engineer for allegedly using his privileged access to user data to cyberstalk women.
“We are investigating this as a matter of urgency,” Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said in a statement.
“It’s important that people’s information is kept secure and private when they use Facebook.”
The worker’s name was not revealed.
Word of the sleazy snooping first emerged on Sunday in a tweet from Jackie Stokes, founder of cybersecurity advisory firm Spyglass Security.
“I’ve been made aware that a security engineer currently employed at Facebook is likely using privileged access to stalk women online,” she tweeted.
“I have Tinder logs. What should I do with this information?” Stokes said she was not among the women being stalked. Facebook is being scrutinized like never before after a whistleblower showed that a British firm mined the socialmedia giant for data used to help Donald Trump win the White House in 2016.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been forced to testify before Congress and explain his company’s safeguards.
But no matter what any company does to protect customers, it takes just one bad worker to cause all sorts of problems, according to David Kennedy, CEO of security consultants TrustedSec.
“Rogue employees are a serious threat to any business, but the risk becomes substantially greater when your company stores the private information of a large number of clients or has access to key services like cloud-based storage,” Kennedy explained to Fox News.
“It is important to have multiple layers of security in place that will prevent — or, at a minimum, detect — malicious behavior by a company insider.”
Stamos pledged to Facebook users that they could be confident the company is focused on protecting their personal information.
“It’s why we have strict policy controls and technical restrictions, so employees only access the data they need to do their jobs — for example to fix bugs, manage customer-support issues or respond to valid legal requests,” he said. “Employees who abuse these controls will be fired.”