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Data on 533 million Facebook users from a 2019 leak, including email addresses and phone numbers were posted on a hacker forum, Business Insider magazine reported Saturday, confirming information from a cybercrime expert.
“The records of 533 million Facebook accounts have just been revealed for free”Alon Gal, technical director of the Hudson Rock cybercrime agency, tweeted on Saturday morning, criticizing Facebook’s “utter negligence.”
Business Insider says it was able to verify that some leaked phone numbers still belonged to the owners of the affected Facebook accounts. “This is old data” whose leak “had already been reported in the media in 2019. We found and repaired this problem in August 2019”, a spokesman for the social network told AFP.
This data includes phone number, full name, date of birth and, for some accounts, the email address, according to Business Insider. Malicious people “will surely use this information for scams, hacking and marketing,” said the cybercrime expert.
This is not the first time that data from millions of users of the world’s leading social network, which has almost 2.8 billion monthly users, has been put online.
Revealed in 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a British firm that captured the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users for political propaganda purposes, it had tarnished the reputation of the social network on the issue of data privacy.
