mebeing
Initially reported by Business Insider, Facebook has over 2.6 billion users and It is reported that personal data of around 533 million Facebook users are posted online on a hacking forum. To put things in correct perspective and to raise a huge alarm, data of about 3 million users was also leaked in 2018.
The leaked data is reported to include, phone numbers, full names, location email IDs, and bio information. There is a huge threat that this data may be used by hackers for malified intentions and committing massive fraud and cheating.
The worst part is, the data is exposed online absolutely FREE. The data includes information from over 105 countries, 32 million records are from the US alone while 11 million users are in the UK, 6 million in India.
A Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider that the data was scraped due to a loop in coding, a vulnerability that the company has already patched in the year 2019.
It does not matter if the data is a couple of years old. There’s a high chance that the users are still using Facebook and the worst scenario is, the personal information could be used to scam people. This may allow bad actors to take huge advantage of leaked data to perform bad hacking attempts.
All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked.
I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021
Mr.Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, first discovered the leaked data earlier in January. A user on a hacking forum advertised an automated bot advertising to provide phone numbers of millions of Facebook in exchange for a fixed asking price.
