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Data from more than 500 million Facebook users posted online
The data of more than 500 million Facebook users who were captured in 2019 has been published on the Internet in a hacker forum. Alon Gal, chief technology officer for Hudson Rock, a company that collects information on cybercrime, accused Facebook of “utter negligence” on the online service Twitter on Saturday.
Posted user data includes full user names, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, and sometimes relationship status as well. The “Business Insider” portal reported that some of the data was still up to date.
“This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is very likely that the phone number used for the account has been leaked,” Gal said. “Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, fraud, piracy and marketing.”
Facebook said it was not a new problem. “This is old data that had been previously reported in 2019,” Facebook’s press office said. “We discovered and fixed the problem in August 2019.”
It is not the first user data scandal that Facebook has come under fire. In 2016, the British consultancy Cambridge Analytica used the personal data of millions of Facebook users for political advertising. (sda / afp)
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