The recent largest-ever data theft from the social media company, Facebook, was concluded tentatively by the company to be an attempt to make money by spammers and no nation-state was involved behind the breach, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The Journal went into further details of the attack by citing people familiar with the internal investigation of the company and said that the people behind the move were in fact a group of Facebook and Instagram spammers that pretend to themselves to be a digital marketing company, and their activities were not veiled from the Facebook security team.

In a news report last week, Facebook was said to have announced that cyber-attackers had stolen data from its platform of about 29 million Facebook accounts by using an automated program that moved from one friend to the next. It further added that the data theft had hit fewer than the 50 million profiles as it was initially reported.

In an email addressed to Reuters, Facebook said that it was extending its cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation over the matter of data breach of its users.

The gigantic data breach has resulted in leaving the platform users more vulnerable to targeted phishing attacks and could make the issue more questionable for the service whose privacy, security practices and moderation have been questioned by a number of scandals, financial analysts and cyber-security experts have said.

The issue of data breach on its platform was first disclosed by Facebook in late September and it had said that the issue has been fixed soon after the discovery by the company on September 25.

As per the report, the social media company is carrying on an internal investigation into the incident and had to cut the number of affected users from its earlier and original estimate after investigators reviewed activity on accounts that may have got affected.

The company has also given a notification to the FBI, Congressional aides, Department of Homeland Security and the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, where presently the company has installed its European headquarters.

The Social Media company has already been in news all for the wrong reasons. It begins with the story of Cambridge Analytica unfolding last year. The Cambridge Analytica is a UK based consulting firm that offers its services to political parties around the globe. As per the report, the company was involved in carrying on data stealing of Facebook users to utilize it for influencing elections in the US.

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