After the leak of 220 thousand. Lithuanian Facebook Data, Experts Warn of Threats – Scammers Can Take Advantage of This

What people were letting each other know leaked

Business Insider posted about $ 533 million on Saturday. Data leaks from Facebook users in 106 countries around the world. It was claimed that up to 32 million. records: US users, 11 million. – UK data, 6 million – Indian. Among all the leaked data, and 220 thousand. Lithuanian information.

It is indicated that the information disclosed includes the addresses of users’ Facebook profiles, telephone numbers, names and surnames, dates of birth and email. email addresses, and all of this data is posted for free on a hacker forum, making it widely available and accessible to anyone with at least minimal skills.

IT specialist Marius Pareščius explained that in this case the threats to the population remain similar to other cases of data leakage, only to the extent that, in this case, users’ passwords have not been leaked.

He explained that it is not possible to speak of hacking in the Facebook system in this case, because the leaked information consists of what the people themselves have made known about themselves on the social network.

“In principle, it is public data that has been published on Facebook and can be seen by any Internet user.

This data was simply collected in one place. If we look at whether it was a robbery, it was not in this case. It is the collection of data from public sources, “he said.

According to M. Pareščius, a great example could be if one of the universities had a list of students who had taken exams, and someone collected that data from more universities and put it in a single table.

“These are the users who allowed their data to be seen on Facebook, their data online and it was collected, organized in a table and filtered,” he explained.

Alerts you of calls

According to M. Pareščius, the Lithuanians who are now on the list can no longer do anything, but they must protect themselves.

“Scammers can use your data to impersonate you, they can offer you all kinds of spam, goods, calls to cheat, to give away money.

There may be typical schemes: “Hello, Marius has had an accident and you have to pay for the victim not to take him to court.” All those things are done that way, there was no systematized data in one place, and now this is how those scammers get that data. These cases will increase now ”, he warned.

M. Pareščius assured that one of the typical tips would be to look at where the data is stored and with whom it is shared.

“As for Facebook, you can set the settings so that only you can see the relevant data, you should review the privacy policy.

In this case, it is the consumers themselves who have allowed the data to be shared, ”he said.

Gave advice

Representatives of the National Cybersecurity Center assured that in this particular case of leaked data, the data obtained showed that the passwords were not made public and that there was no risk of hacking the accounts.

“However, the data can be used to prepare social engineering attacks,” said the response.

Tomas Parnarauskas, Director of ESET Lithuania and cyber security expert, said that in general, social media is a very good tool for scammers and they can see not only human data, but also information related to friends and contacts.

“We always recommend turning on two-factor authentication in any case, so if someone tries to connect to your account using the leaked information, at least you know that someone is trying to connect. This is a basic recommendation,” he said.

In general, T. Parnarauskas also explained that residents can receive more fraudulent calls, so they should be more careful.

“After receiving calls and strangers or sometimes even acquaintances, because sometimes data leaks can allow you to see who your friends are when you log into your account, you should call them back if you suspect. It will not get worse,” he advised .

Not the first time

Delfi has previously written that, according to Alon Gal, director of the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock (USA), “Leaked personal data can become valuable information for cybercriminals who use personal data and pretend to use or fraudulently trick them into logging in. ‘.

Gal said he noticed a large amount of data leaked from Facebook on Saturday.

“A database of personal information the size of the phone numbers of many Facebook users would certainly be an incentive for malicious people to use the data to carry out social engineering attacks or hackers,” Gal said.

This is not the first time that a large number of Facebook users’ phone numbers have been made public online. In 2019, when a loophole was found in Facebook’s security settings, the phone numbers of millions of people were scanned.

Read more about the leaked data here.