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More than 533 million Facebook users have had their phone numbers, full names, locations, email addresses, and other biographical information leaked online.
The leak was discovered last week by Alon Gal, Chief Technology Officer of a cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, after the data was published in a low-level hacking forum, Business Insider reports.
Gal first discovered the initial data hack in January when a user in the forum advertised a bot that would provide the information of the Facebook users for a fee. However, after last week’s leak, the information is now widely and freely available.
Business Insider and Motherboard have both verified the data in the leak. A spokesperson for Facebook told Business Insider the data was years old and was accessed due to a system vulnerability that was fixed in 2019.
Gal tweeted that the leak affected users in 106 countries — including more than 32 million users in the United States — and said that the data gathered could be used by cybercriminals to impersonate or scam users.
“A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social-engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts,” Gal told Business Insider.
Gal says that Facebook, which has long been plagued with data privacy issues, could have alerted users affected by the breach so that they were aware of the fact that their data was available for use by cybercriminals for phishing schemes or fraud. Other than that, he says there was little else Facebook could do given the fact that the data was already in the public.
“Individuals signing up to a reputable company like Facebook are trusting them with their data, and Facebook [is] supposed to treat the data with utmost respect. Users having their personal information leaked is a huge breach of trust and should be handled accordingly,” he told Business Insider.
This data breach is one of many that has occurred in recent years. In 2020, there were more than 1,000 data breaches and more than 150 million records exposed as a result. A data breach can expose confidential and sensitive information to hackers looking to use the information for nefarious purposes.
Just this February, Facebook paid out $650 million to users in the settlement of a privacy lawsuit, after users alleged the company used photo face-tagging and other biometric data without their permission. Nearly 1.6 million Facebook users in Illinois who submitted claims for the class action lawsuit settlement will be affected.
Lawyers are currently investigating recent data breaches nationwide and the impact that they’ve had on Americans. If you were affected by a data breach, you might be eligible to join or file a class action lawsuit. Share your experience in the comments below.
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54 thoughts onMore Than 500 Million Facebook Users’ Phone Numbers, Personal Information Leaked
Add me they remove phone number and email mail so I can’t get in