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A user of a low-level hacker forum posted free online phone numbers and personal details of hundreds of millions of Facebook users, informs “Business Insider.”
The disclosed data includes personal information of more 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including data from more than 32 million users in the United States, 11 million users in the United Kingdom, and 6 million users in India. These include their phone numbers, Facebook ID numbers, full names, locations, dates of birth, biographical details, and in some cases, email addresses.
Business Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified some of it, comparing the phone numbers of known Facebook users with the identification numbers listed in the dataset. They also verified the data by testing the email addresses from the dataset in Facebook’s password recovery feature, which can be used to partially reveal the user’s phone number.
Leaked data can provide valuable information to cybercriminalsThey use people’s personal information to impersonate them or to transmit their login credentials, according to Alon Gal, technical director at cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who first discovered the data today.
“A database of this size, containing personal information such as the phone numbers of many Facebook users, would undoubtedly lead bad actors to use the data to carry out social engineering attacks (or) hacking attempts,” Gal said.
Gal first discovered the leaked data in January, when a user on the same hacking forum announced an automated bot that could provide phone numbers to hundreds of millions of Facebook users in exchange for money.
Now the entire dataset is posted for free on the hacker forum, which makes widely available to anyone with basic data knowledge.
This is not the first time that a large number of Facebook users’ phone numbers have been revealed online. A vulnerability that was discovered in 2019 allowed the phone numbers of millions of people to be removed from Facebook’s servers in violation of the terms of use. Facebook said the vulnerability was fixed in August 2019.
Previously, Facebook promised to take serious action against mass data deletion after Cambridge Analytica misused the data of 80 million users in violation of Facebook’s terms of use to target voters with political ads in elections. Presidential elections of 2016. г.
Gal said that in terms of security, Facebook didn’t have much to do to help usersaffected by the leak, since their data is already in view, but added that Facebook can notify users so that they can stay alert to possible phishing or fraud schemes using their personal data.
“People who sign up with a reputable company like Facebook trust them with their data, and Facebook must treat data with the utmost respect,” Gal said, adding: “Users whose personal information has been leaked are a huge violation of the trust”.
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