All news with #meta tag

🛡️ Meta has provided selected long‑time bug bounty researchers with a new tool, WhatsApp Research Proxy, to streamline analysis of WhatsApp's network protocol and reduce barriers to in‑depth research. The company is also running a pilot that invites research teams to focus on platform abuse with internal engineering and tooling support. Meta said it has paid more than $25 million to over 1,400 researchers in 15 years and recently added anti‑scraping protections after a study showed an account‑enumeration technique able to map billions of users.

🔒 Cybersecurity researchers disclosed a chain of remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities affecting AI inference frameworks from Meta, NVIDIA, Microsoft and open-source projects such as vLLM and SGLang. The flaws stem from reused code that called ZeroMQ’s recv-pyobj() and passed data directly into Python’s pickle.loads(), enabling unauthenticated RCE over exposed sockets. Vendors have released patches replacing unsafe pickle usage with JSON-based serialization and adding authentication and transport protections. Operators are urged to upgrade to patched releases and harden ZMQ channels, restrict network exposure, and avoid deserializing untrusted data.

📨 Check Point email security researchers uncovered a large-scale phishing campaign that abuses Meta's Business Suite and the facebookmail.com delivery domain to send convincing fake notifications. Attackers craft messages that appear to originate from Meta, allowing them to bypass many traditional security filters and increase the likelihood of SMBs across the U.S. and internationally engaging with malicious links or credential-stealing pages. Organizations should strengthen email defenses, monitor suspicious Business Suite activity, and educate staff to reduce exposure.

🔐 A high-profile entry by a hacker known as ‘Eugene’ at Pwn2Own Ireland 2025 withdrew a claimed zero-click remote code execution exploit targeting WhatsApp, forfeiting the event’s $1 million top prize. Organizers Trend Micro ZDI say Team Z3 is sharing findings privately for coordinated disclosure to Meta, while WhatsApp reports no viable exploit was publicly demonstrated. The cancellation has fueled speculation about exploit readiness and underscores the role of responsible disclosure and rigorous triage before public demonstrations.

🛡️ Meta is rolling out new anti-scam features for Messenger and WhatsApp to help users detect and avoid fraud. Messenger testing includes AI-assisted scam detection that warns about suspicious new contacts and offers options to block, report, or submit messages for review. WhatsApp will display warnings about screen-sharing with unknown callers. These protections are enabled by default.

🔒 Meta is rolling out new anti-scam features for WhatsApp and Messenger. On WhatsApp, users will receive warnings when attempting to share their screen with unknown contacts during video calls to help prevent accidental exposure of bank details or verification codes. On Messenger, an opt-in Scam detection setting flags potentially suspicious messages from unknown senders; detection runs on-device to preserve end-to-end encryption unless users choose to submit recent messages for AI review, which removes E2EE. Meta also said it has taken action against thousands of impersonating pages and disrupted millions of accounts tied to organized scam centers.

⚖️ A German consumer association has launched a model declaratory action against Meta after data from more than 530 million Facebook users was posted on the dark web in April 2021. The Federation of German Consumer Organisations argues Meta failed to protect user data and to inform affected people adequately. Plaintiffs seek tiered compensation of €100–€600 and the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court will first address jurisdictional and formal matters in the hearing.

🛡️ The Singapore Police Force has issued an implementation directive under the Online Criminal Harms Act requiring Meta to implement enhanced facial recognition for Singapore users and to prioritise review of local scam reports by September 30. The Ministry of Home Affairs said Facebook was the primary platform for government impersonation scams between June 2024 and June 2025, and the SPF disrupted about 2,000 problematic ad schemes on Meta. If Meta fails to comply without a reasonable excuse it faces a S$1m fine and daily penalties after conviction.

⚖️ The Irish government has appointed Niamh Sweeney as a member of the Data Protection Commission, the authority that leads EU oversight of major technology companies. The appointment has drawn strong criticism from privacy organization Noyb, which highlights Sweeney’s previous role as a lobbyist for Meta. Critics, including Max Schrems, argue this raises questions about impartiality and potential regulatory capture. As recently as December, the DPC fined Meta €251 million for breaches of GDPR, a fact cited by opponents of the appointment.

🔒 CrowdStrike describes how the Falcon platform delivers unified visibility and lifecycle defense across the full AI stack, from GPUs and training data to inference pipelines and SaaS agents. The post highlights integrations with NVIDIA, AWS, Intel, Dell, Meta, and Salesforce to extend protection into infrastructure, data, models, and applications. It also introduces agentic defense via Charlotte AI for autonomous triage and rapid response, and emphasizes governance controls to prevent data leaks and adversarial manipulation.

🛡️ A new FileFix campaign impersonates Meta support to trick users into pasting a disguised PowerShell command into the File Explorer address bar, which then downloads and executes malware. The attackers hide a second-stage script and encrypted binaries inside a seemingly benign JPG hosted on Bitbucket using steganography. The final payload is the StealC infostealer, designed to harvest browser credentials, messaging logins, crypto wallets, cloud keys and more. Security vendor Acronis observed multiple evolving variants over a two-week period and urges user education on these novel ClickFix/FileFix tactics.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now offers an on-demand deployment option for customized Meta Llama 3.3 models that have been fine-tuned or distilled in Bedrock; models customized on or after September 15, 2025 are eligible. The feature lets customers process requests in real time and pay only for consumed compute, removing the need for pre-provisioned always-on resources. Bedrock continues to provide a managed platform with built-in security, privacy, and responsible AI capabilities.

🛡️ Attaullah Baig, former head of security at WhatsApp, has filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that Facebook knowingly failed to fix multiple security flaws in breach of its 2019 settlement with the FTC. The complaint asserts that in 2022 roughly 100,000 accounts were compromised daily, rising to as many as 400,000 daily lockouts by last year, and that inadequate anti-scraping protections exposed profile data at scale. Baig invokes the whistleblower-protection provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the filing has prompted wider media coverage and potential regulatory scrutiny.

🔒 Researchers disclosed two coordinated campaigns that distribute fake browser extensions via malvertising and counterfeit sites to steal credentials, session tokens, and hijack Meta business accounts. Bitdefender documented ads pushing a fake "Meta Verified" add‑on named SocialMetrics Pro that harvests Facebook session cookies and exfiltrates them to a Telegram bot while also querying ipinfo[.]io for IP data. Cybereason described a separate campaign using counterfeit sites promoting a bogus Madgicx Plus platform and multiple rogue Chrome extensions that request broad site access, capture Google identity data, then pivot to Facebook to facilitate account takeover.

⚠️ Meta’s new Friend Map feature on Instagram is framed as an opt-in way to see friends’ locations and shared hangouts, but it raises serious privacy and safety concerns. Enabling the map can expose precise real‑time or habitual location data that bad actors could exploit for stalking, targeted harassment, or profiling. The feature blurs digital privacy and physical security, so users should carefully review settings, limit audiences, or decline participation if concerned about their safety.