Meta Fires 11,000 Employees for Providing Illegal Services to Hackers

Since 2021, Meta has fired a dozen of its security guards and other employees for selling its users’ data. According to the investigations, the employees were caught selling personal information and login details to hackers.

It was revealed that the offenders collected thousands of dollars as bribes from clients to access their accounts. The Meta account recovery tool, Online Operations (Oops), is known to have been leveraged in this act.

According to the reports, the offenders included security guards from Allied Universal. It was discovered that the security guards used Oops to recover specific users’ accounts.

Oops is a tool that enables employees to report inaccessible accounts and then restores control. Oops was designed to be used only in special situations such as for public figures. The use of Oops increased from 22,000 to 50,270 in 2020 according to the Wall Street Journal.

The investigations revealed that the security guards got access to Oops on Facebook Intranet. In 2021, it was discovered that a security contractor breached accounts and sold them to third parties. Further investigation of the incident revealed that the security contractor had recovered several accounts for hackers in exchange for bitcoin.

Last week, Meta decided to lay off 11,000 workers because of the issue. According to a worker retraining notice, 871 more employees will be laid off at its New York offices next year.

Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, said in a statement that the company will take appropriate actions against employees illegally providing services. Allied Universal also said that it will respond seriously to reports and any kind of infringement.

Hackers Operating on Facebook

Hackers have been leveraging Facebook to conduct their espionage activities. In August, Meta took action against two threat actors known as Bitter and Transparent Tribe (aka APT36). According to Meta’s quarterly report, the South Asian threat actors used Facebook to distribute malware to potential targets.