Meta confirms major breach, hackers steal data of 1,500 employees from GitHub

In a major security incident, tech giant Meta has confirmed a security breach where hackers managed to break into some of its GitHub repositories. The intrusion, which was detected a few weeks ago, happened after an outside group used a single employee's stolen login credentials to gain access.The breach has compromised the personal information of roughly 1,500 people, most of whom are Meta employees based in the US. Notifications to the impacted individuals officially started going out on Tuesday.While a breach at Meta sounds alarming, the company clarified that its internal systems and networks were completely untouched. The hackers only accessed business data hosted on GitHub, a popular platform where developers store and manage software code.Meta told SecurityWeek that 99% of the stolen data was just business information and software source code related to various products. Only the remaining 1% was personal data. Personal info was uploaded by mistake, says MetaInterestingly, Meta admitted that this personal data was never supposed to be on GitHub in the first place. It was uploaded to the repositories by mistake, which goes directly against the company’s internal security policies.However, there is a major silver lining to the situation. A significant portion of this exposed personal information was actually synthetic or anonymised test data, which developers often use to safely test out new software. Because of this mix-up, Meta believes the attackers will have a very hard time telling genuine employee records apart from the fake ones. Furthermore, early investigations with GitHub suggest that the hackers were not even specifically targeting Meta's data.Internal systems safe, confirms MetaClarifying the exact nature of the breach, a Meta spokesperson stated, “This was not a vulnerability in any Meta product, and Meta’s internal systems were not breached. Meta business data held in a GitHub repository was improperly accessed using an employee’s stolen credentials, this included a small amount of personal data for a limited number of people, most of whom were Meta employees.”Company ramps up security measuresAs soon as the breach was discovered, Meta’s security team swung into action. They immediately shut down the attackers' access and brought in GitHub's security team, regulators, and law enforcement to investigate the incident. To protect the affected individuals from potential identity theft or phishing attempts, the company is offering them free credit and dark web monitoring services.The tech giant has also taken strict steps to prevent this from happening again, including hardening its product security to address any risks stemming from the stolen source code.“We’ve since rotated secrets found in the repositories, implemented new controls to prevent user data from being stored in GitHub, and worked with GitHub on additional measures to protect our repositories,” the spokesperson added.As a second line of defence, Meta is now adding proactive scanning controls to instantly detect if any user data is accidentally uploaded to the platform in the future.- Ends