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The phone numbers and personal details of more than 533 million Facebook users were posted for free online, Business Insider reports. The leak contains information on people from 106 countries, including nearly 433,000 people from Bulgaria. Phone data, full user names, location information, dates of birth, biographical data, and email addresses can be found in the data set.
Leaked data can be especially valuable to cybercriminals who use personal information about people to impersonate or mislead them, explains Alon Gal, technical director at cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock. He was the first to report the findings.
Gal was able to confirm the authenticity of some of them after comparing the phone numbers in the matrix with those of people he actually knew.
https://t.co/4BSqea2Kur
– Alon Gal (Under the Gap) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021
According to Gal, a database of this size, containing personal information about a group of users of the world’s largest social network, will certainly attract the attention of criminals. The expert asked Facebook users to be on the lookout for social engineering attacks.
A Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider that the data was obtained as a result of a vulnerability that the company fixed in 2019.
The data set is the same that was reported to be circulating in hacker circles in January. However, if access to it was paid for then, now the matrix has apparently become widely available. This is the first time such a huge database of information has been published for free.
The news comes years after the first major scandal with Cambridge Analytica, which was revealed to have used data from more than 80 million Facebook users to target political ads ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Brexit referendum.
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