19/04/2021: Cybersecurity & Tech News Roundup

The Home Secretary has shared concerns over Facebook's messaging encryption plan

Usually when Facebook makes headlines, the issue is quite often due to privacy - location data, advertising, data breaches, etc - and today's story is no exception. What's interesting here, though, is the fact that instead of a lack of user privacy causing concern, it's actually the other way around - Facebook's messaging encryption plan is causing the Home Secretary to be very concerned.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp is already known for it's end-to-end encryption, but Facebook is looking to roll that out across all it's messaging services, scrambling Messenger and Instagram DM chats so that no one else can access them as well. The Home Secretary has warned that this could jeopardise law enforcement's ongoing work to combat child abuse - a process that often begins via private online messaging. If the police struggle to access evidence of grooming in private DMs, criminals could go unpunished.

This is certainly a difficult balancing act for Facebook - how do you ensure user privacy and keep the public's private conversations away from the prying eyes of nefarious parties, while also not helping criminals to harm children? We'll keep an eye on this situation and see how it develops, but for now, you can read more about this story here.

Facebook commits to allowing employees to continue working from home

On to more positive news regarding Facebook this time - as many tech giants seem to be going off the idea of remote working, Facebook has announced that it's invested in working from home as the future of work and will allow employees to carry out their duties at home.

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that half of Facebook's employees could be working from home in the next 5 to 10 years, and at the time, many big tech orgs like Twitter, Microsoft, and Google echoed his sentiments. Now though, Silicon Valley seems to be moving away from this method of working, citing the lack of division between employees private and professional life leading to staff burnout being part of the reason.

Facebook's Silicon Valley office is set to open in May, but the social network expects the office to not reach anywhere near full capacity until September at the earliest. Read more here.

Domino's India has suffered a data breach

Cyber-criminals have been targeting Indian organisations more than ever before lately, and their latest target is Domino's India. The organisation's unfortunate data breach led to a whole heap of customer info being exposed, including names, credit card details, and phone numbers - all of which were put on sale on the Dark Web. The cyber-criminal behind it all is also claiming to have gained access to to over 250 employees' data, as well as a bunch of internal files - but this hasn't yet been confirmed. Read more here.

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