A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading users about privacy, setting a record penalty. Meta plans to appeal. This week a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion. The order follows a jury finding that the company deceived Facebook users about their privacy, and it’s the biggest fine ever imposed on Meta. State District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote that Facebook’s deception was intentional and that executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked. “Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” he said, as reported by the Associated Press. This is a case about promises, not about a breach. Jurors found in September that Meta committed over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws by making misleading public statements about how it handled users’ personal data. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm harvested Facebook data to build targeted political ads for the 2016 election. New Mexico had asked the court to fine Meta between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing that only a large penalty would push the company to change its behavior. Meta’s lawyers said the fine should not exceed $3.4 billion and argued that any higher amount would be unconstitutional. The jury found more than 43 million violations, including 2.1 million under specific claims. Each violation can carry a fine of up to $5,000. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the ruling sends a clear warning to technology companies that they must follow the law. Under the state’s constitution, fines for consumer protection violations go toward education. However, the money may remain tied up while Meta appeals the decision. Meta plans to appeal the $25 billion ruling. The company argues that the decision and the way New Mexico is enforcing consumer protection laws make it almost impossible to operate in the state. Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, says the case is an attempt to restrict free speech and impose new rules on what people can say online. The company says it is confident it will win the appeal. Meta’s lawyers also argued that the state failed to prove that residents had actually seen the misleading statements or suffered harm as a result. Meta is worth $1.8 trillion and brought in more than $200 billion in revenue last year, and its shares rose 2% after the announcement, with earnings due that day. A nonprofit director called $25 billion a drop in the bucket for Meta, though he said it shows people want accountability. Both can be true: the company says doing business in New Mexico is all but impossible, and Wall Street shrugged. The history explains why the number is so large. Cambridge Analytica got data through a personality quiz app that around 300,000 people took, and the app also pulled data on their friends, building a dataset of 87 million profiles. Meta banned the app in 2015 and asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, and the firm shut down in May 2018. The company later agreed to pay $725 million in December 2022 to settle a class action over sharing with Cambridge Analytica, and the FTC fined it $5 billion in 2019, a fifth of today’s award. New Mexico was not part of the $18 billion settlement Meta reached in August with almost all other US states and territories. The deal includes stronger child-safety measures and $459 million related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is Meta’s second legal defeat in New Mexico in six months. In March, a jury ordered the company to pay $375 million for misleading users about children’s safety. Meta’s appeal could reduce the $25 billion fine if a court lowers the number of violations. The case also sends a warning to companies: privacy promises have legal consequences. As the judge stated, Facebook told users they controlled their data, but this was not true. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Cambridge Analytica Scandal)
Cloud hosting provider Railway published an urgent warning to users after detecting suspicious activity on its systems that store customer environment variables earlier this week. The company says its investigation indicates that, in some cases, an unauthorized third party may have obtained decrypted variables and urges all users to proactively rotate secrets and credentials. “Our investigation to date indicates that an unauthorized third party may have accessed encrypted environment variables and, for some of them, obtained the decrypted contents,” Railway says. “Environment variables may contain secrets such as API keys or database and registry credentials,” the company clarifies. Railway is a cloud platform for developers to deploy and run applications, APIs, databases, and various backend services. It has around 4.8 million users and hosts more than 16 million services.
Hackers compromised the LiteLLM project’s PyPI package and published malicious Docker images with a payload that steals credentials, secrets, and environment variables. The supply-chain attack affected all PyPI wheels (.whl installation packages) for LiteLLM version 1.107.0, impacting Windows, Linux, and macOS systems. LiteLLM is an open-source Python SDK and AI gateway that enables applications to access AI models from different providers through a common API. It is a massively popular project with 61,800 GitHub stars, 92 million monthly downloads on PyPI, and is used by high-profile companies like NVIDIA, Netflix, AT&T, and Okta. The project says that the release pipeline was compromised on October 21 and a threat actor pushed version 1.107.0 to the Docker registry and PyPI. "This version contained compiled malware which steals credentials and loads remote-code execution tools," the maintainer says, adding that customers running the private enterprise were not impacted.
Right now, there is probably an AI agent running on a laptop somewhere in your network. It stores API keys and database passwords, can access your internal systems, and works without anyone watching. Nobody reviewed its access. Nobody owns it. If an employee had that much reach with that little oversight, you would call it an insider risk. So why do we still call the agent a productivity tool?
eMudhra, an Indian certificate authority (CA), will withdraw from its global SSL/TLS certificate business, its board decided on Thursday. The decision came five days after a researcher reported recovering the private keys of eight of its intermediate CA certificates. eMudhra said it will replace affected customers' certificates with free ones from partners, though its
Eight compromised eMudhra intermediate CA private keys risk unauthorized TLS signing and MitM interception. Read our analysis and containment guide. The post EMudhra Intermediate CA Certificates Compromised appeared first on Unit 42.
Linux servers running KSMBD, the kernel's built-in SMB server, are exposed to two publicly reported remote code execution flaws rated 9.0 by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, with no fix yet in the mainline kernel. One of them, ZDI-CAN-33774, can be triggered before any network authentication. The other, ZDI-CAN-33549, requires the SMB Direct transport and an RDMA-capable network
Social media giant Meta was ordered to pay 25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy lawsuit that sprang from the company's Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which came to light in 2018. According to multiple reports from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal, state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew called
Microsoft says IT admins can re-enable the retired Exchange Web Services (EWS) API in Exchange Online to fix EWS apps that have stopped working. EWS is an API for developing apps that can access Exchange mailbox items (e.g., email messages, meetings, and contacts) from Exchange Online and on-premises Exchange servers. This API is used by various apps, including but not limited to Outlook desktop add-ins, older versions of Outlook for Windows, the Apple Mail / Calendar on macOS, and various other apps. In February, the company announced it will start blocking the EWS API by default on October 1, 2026, but will let IT administrators temporarily maintain access via an app allowlist until the final shutdown on April 1, 2027. However, when EWS is disabled, the apps show errors ranging from alerts that the EWS protocol is unavailable to repeated prompts to enter the username or password.
INTERPOL on Thursday announced that a coordinated law enforcement action has disrupted 10,909 malicious networks and recovered more than $105 million in illicit funds. In tandem, the effort saw law enforcement agencies from 21 countries arrest 1,462 suspects. Codenamed Operation Serengeti III, the cybercrime crackdown took place between June 29 and August 31, 2026. "Authorities identified
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