Facebook has leaked more than 500 million phones and personal data of users; Brazilians included



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Once again, Facebook has seen its security compromised by a leak. Hackers exposed more than 533 million personal data of users of the social network. The victims come from 106 countries around the world, including Brazil, where at least 8 million accounts have been compromised.

The data includes cell phones, full name, date of birth, biographies, user names and emails in some cases. According to a spokesperson for the Business Insider platform, the vulnerability occurred in 2019 and has now been fixed.

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This type of information is very valuable on the Internet, as scammers can use this data to deceive people, sell to companies, or even create and discover logins. “A database of this size containing private information, such as the phone numbers of many Facebook users, would undoubtedly lead to criminals taking advantage of the data to carry out social engineering attacks. [ou] hacking attempts, ”Alon Gal, a cybersecurity expert, told the site.

The Facebook leak was discovered after it was posted on a hacker forum. In January, one of the group’s members was selling a bot that could deliver phone numbers to hundreds of thousands of social media users. Now, all this information is openly published and can be accessed by anyone.

According to information published by Gal, who had access to the leaked data, at least 8 million Brazilian accounts were affected. The most affected country was the United States, with 32 million accounts. The UK had 11 million and India 6 million.

Another Facebook leak

This is not the first time that something like this has happened to Mark Zuckerberg’s social network. In 2019, a leak exposed the phones of thousands of Facebook users. The platform guaranteed at the time that the situation was corrected. The data available this time may be related to this earlier failure.

“People who sign up with a reputable company like Facebook trust their data and Facebook should treat the data with the utmost respect,” Gal explained. “Users to whom their personal information is leaked are a great breach of trust and should be treated accordingly,” added the expert, and said that from the moment the leak occurs, that person’s data will be available on the internet forever.

Via Business Insider



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