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The personal details of more than 500 million users of the social network Facebook, including phone numbers and email addresses, were published online this Saturday in a hacking forum, reported Business Insider magazine.
According to the magazine, a forum user posted the phone numbers and personal details of 533 million Facebook users. The exposed data includes personal information of Facebook users from 106 countries, including more than 32 million registrations in the US, 11 million in the UK and 6 million in India. They include their phone numbers, Facebook identity, full names, locations, dates of birth, biographies, and in some cases, email addresses.
The data released is old and a Facebook spokesperson told the magazine that it was stolen due to a vulnerability, which the company fixed in 2019. Despite this, Alon Gal of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock was the first to discover the size of what was stolen. data, he warned, can still provide valuable information to cybercriminals.
“A database of this size, containing private information, such as the phone numbers of many Facebook users, would certainly take bad elements to leverage the data to carry out attacks or hacking attempts,” he said, quoted by Insider. . According to Gal, his company discovered the data first published in January, when a user on the hacking forum announced that a “bot” (hacked program) could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users in return. cash value, having verified that the data was legitimate.
The full dataset has now been posted for free on the same hacking forum, making it widely available to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the data.
This is not the first time that such a large amount of information from Facebook users has been exposed online. The vulnerability of the social network, which was discovered in 2019, made it possible to remove the phone numbers of millions of people from Facebook’s servers. The company previously pledged to beef up security after the scandal with Cambridge Analytica, which posted data from 80 million users, in violation of Facebook’s terms of service, to target voters with political ads in the 2016 U.S. election.
According to Alon Gal, from a security point of view, there is not much Facebook can do to help users affected by the breach as their data is already exposed, but he added that Facebook could notify users that they could remain Watch out for possible “phishing” schemes (data theft).
“People who sign up with a reputable company like Facebook trust them with their data and Facebook is supposed to treat data with the utmost respect,” Gal said.
“The leakage of users’ personal information is a huge breach of trust and must be dealt with accordingly,” he stressed.
