Eye! They expose data from 500 million Facebook users

The information emerged from a 2019 leak and was posted on a hacker portal.

Data on more than 500 million Facebook users from a 2019 leak, including email addresses and phone numbers, were posted on a hacker forum, Business Insider magazine reported, confirming information from an expert on cyber crime.

“The records of 533 million Facebook accounts have just been revealed for free,” he tweeted. Alon gal, technical director of the Hudson Rock cybercrime agency on Saturday morning, criticizing the “utter negligence” of Facebook.

“This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is very likely that the phone number used for the account has been leaked,” he said in the post.

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 Facebook spokesperson told AFP.

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These data include phone number, full name, date of birth and, for some accounts, 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.

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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, had tarnished the social network’s reputation on data privacy.