Facebook Protect for Government Agencies
More and more Facebook and Instagram accounts are getting hacked and so Facebook has introduced Facebook Protect.
I've been helping many public sector and government agencies protect their Meta assets and this is another step from Facebook that you need to be aware of, and turn on.
So please share this email with your social media manager or external agency.
What is Facebook Protect?
  • A security programme for groups of people that are more likely to be targeted by malicious hackers, such as human rights defenders, journalists, and government officials.
What do you need to do?
  • No action is required unless you’re prompted to enrol directly by Facebook. NOTE: you will be prompted by Facebook eventually when they get around to it.
What can I do now?
  • Set up two-factor authentication.
What is Meta saying about hacking on their platforms?

Meta says that government agencies are at the centre of critical communities for public debate - enabling democratic elections, holding governments and organisations accountable, and defending human rights around the world. Unfortunately, this also means that you are highly targeted by bad actors.

Facebook Protect helps these groups of people adopt stronger account security protections, like two-factor authentication, and monitors for potential hacking threats.

Read more here.

Facebook Statement

Mandating Protections For Most Targeted People

Two-factor authentication — particularly by using third-party authentication apps — significantly improves the security of your online accounts. Right now, anyone can enroll in two-factor authentication and everyone should.

However, this important feature has been historically underutilized across the internet — even by people that are more likely to be targeted by malicious hackers, such as journalists, activists, political candidates and others.

With Facebook Protect, we worked to make enrollment and use of two-factor authentication as frictionless as possible for these groups of people by providing better user experience and support. We’re also starting to require that they use it. We know that there will always be a small subset of users that won’t immediately enroll, for example those that happen to be less active on our platform at the time of a given mandate. However, we believe this is an important step forward for these highly targeted communities. What we’ve seen so far is encouraging: in early testing, simplifying our enrollments flows, improving customer support, and mandating Facebook Protect brought adoption rates to over 90 percent in one month for these groups.

Over the next several months, we’re going to carefully expand this requirement globally. We’re encouraged by our early findings and will continue to improve Facebook Protect over time.

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