Irish Regulator Fined Meta $275 Million for Data Breach Exposing 533 Million Users' Data

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The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Facebook parent company Meta €265 million (around $275 million) following a data breach that saw the personal details of hundreds of millions of Facebook users published online.

In April 2021, the DPC launched an investigation after data, including names, phone numbers, and email addresses of up to 533 million users, appeared on an online hacking forum. Facebook said at the time that the information, some of which had already appeared online several years ago, was "scraped,” but not hacked, by malicious actors through a vulnerability in its tools before September 2019.

Facebook said it patched the vulnerability in 2019, preventing further data from being harvested. "Because this data set was so large, because there had been previous instances of scraping on the platform where …