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Personal data of 533 million Facebook users has been leaked online, including full names, phone numbers, dates of birth, location data and email addresses.
The leaked data also includes users’ Facebook IDs, account creation dates, relationship status, and biographical information.
Security expert Alon Gal, who serves as Chief Technology Officer at Hudson Rock, said this online leak has a huge impact on privacy.
“In early 2020, a vulnerability was exploited that allowed the phone number linked to each Facebook account to be seen,” Gal said.
This vulnerability was exploited to create a database containing the information of 533 million users in all countries.
“It was very poorly informed and today the database became much more worrisome,” he said.
A few days ago, a user created a Telegram bot that allows users to query the database for a low fee.
This allowed people to find the phone numbers linked to a large portion of Facebook accounts.
Data is a treasure trove for cybercriminals. “Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scam, piracy and marketing,” Gal said.
It provided a full list of affected users by country, including more than 14.3 million users from “Africa”.
While South Africa is not explicitly mentioned, it can be assumed that millions of local Facebook users are affected.
Liz Bourgeois, director of strategic response communications at Facebook, stressed that this is not a new data breach.
“This is old data that was previously reported in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” Bourgeois said.
Bourgeois was referring to a security flaw that allowed access to information without authorization.
This data breach, while not based on a new security flaw, threatens Facebook’s business model of collecting a large amount of personal information and using it to sell targeted ads.
Comment from Alon Gal
Facebook’s 533,000,000 records were leaked for free.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, the phone number used for the account has most likely been leaked.
I have yet to see Facebook acknowledge this utter neglect of their data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8
– Alon Gal (Under the Gap) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021
Facebook response
Facebook’s 533,000,000 records were leaked for free.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, the phone number used for the account has most likely been leaked.
I have yet to see Facebook acknowledge this utter neglect of their data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8
– Alon Gal (Under the Gap) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021
Now read: Facebook needs more humans to control content
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