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The leaked data includes the personal information of more than 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including more than 32 million users in the United States, 11 million users in the United Kingdom, and 6 million users in India, and many users from more than one hundred countries.
According to Business Insider, phone numbers, Facebook profile addresses, names, locations, dates of birth, bios, and in some cases email addresses have been leaked.
2020 By the end of the year, Facebook has around 1.8 billion active users per day.
“Leaked data can be exploited by cybercriminals using people’s personal information and pretending or misleading to extract their login details,” said Alon Galas, chief of cybercrime intelligence at Hudson.
The Business Insider portal claims to have verified some of the data by comparing the leaked data with users’ Facebook profiles.
“A database of this size, containing private information such as the phone numbers of many Facebook users, would undoubtedly encourage bad actors to use the data in social engineering attacks. [arba] piracy, ”A. Galas told Business Insider.
Facebook has yet to comment on the data breach.
Galas first discovered the leaked data in January, when a user of the same hacking forum announced an automated bot that could provide the phone numbers of hundreds of millions of Facebook users in exchange for money. The motherboard then wrote about the existence of this automated robot and confirmed that the data it received was true.
All data is now posted on the hacking forum for free, making it 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 available online. 2019 a security vulnerability discovered has made it possible to retrieve the phone numbers of millions of people from Facebook servers. Facebook said the loophole was closed in 2019 in August.
Gal says that in terms of security, Facebook can no longer do anything to help affected users, as the data is already readily available online. However, he added that Facebook could warn users to be vigilant not to engage in fraudulent schemes.
“People who sign up with a trusted company like Facebook trust them with their data, and Facebook should treat data with the utmost respect,” Gal said.
“Leakage of consumer personal information is a major breach of trust and should be dealt with accordingly,” Gal said.
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