Meta is notifying roughly 1,500 people, most of them employees in the US, that their personal information was impacted after hackers got into some of the company’s GitHub repositories.
The intrusion was detected a few weeks ago. According to the tech giant, an outside group gained access to the repositories using an employee’s stolen credentials.
Meta’s security team shut down the attackers’ access and brought in GitHub and law enforcement. Notifications to the impacted individuals started going out on Tuesday.
Meta told SecurityWeek that 99% of the data the hackers took was business data, in the form of software code related to some of its products. The remaining 1% was personal data.
That personal data had been added to the repositories by mistake and should not have been there, as storing it on GitHub went against company policy. Meta has not said what types of personal information were involved.
The company also noted that a significant portion of what looked like personal data was actually synthetic or anonymized test data. As a result, the attackers may not readily be able to tell genuine records apart from test data.
Based on its investigation with GitHub so far, Meta does not believe the hackers were specifically after its data.
Meta is also notifying regulators, and the people whose information was involved are being offered credit and dark web monitoring services.
“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,” a Meta spokesperson told SecurityWeek.
In response to the incident, Meta rotated secrets it found in the affected repositories. It also hardened its product security to address risks stemming from access to its business data.
The company is working with its teams that use GitHub to keep user data off the platform. As a second line of defense, it is adding controls for proactive scanning to detect any user data uploaded by mistake.
“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 said.
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is senior managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher before starting a career in journalism in 2011. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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