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The data of more than 500 million Facebook users were freely available (Photo: REUTERS / Regis Duvignau / File Photo)
An unknown person posted the personal details of at least 533 million Facebook users in free access on one of the hacker forums. In particular, their mobile phone numbers and email addresses, writes Bussiness Insider.
In total, the personal information of users in 106 countries around the world was publicly available, including 32 million user records from the United States, 11 million from Great Britain and 6 million from India. It is not yet known if there is information from the Ukrainians among the leaked data.
According to the post, the hacker released phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full usernames, places and dates of birth, biographical information, and email addresses.
In a comment to Business Insider, Elon Gal, a cybersecurity specialist at Hudson Rock who was the first to report the leaked information, said the data was previously sold on hacker forums via a special bot. According to him, attackers are likely to use such a large database of personal information to carry out cyberattacks or hacking attempts.
“Leakage of users’ personal data [Facebook] “This is a significant weakening of confidence, so it needs to be addressed accordingly,” Gal said.
The company has not yet commented on information about the “drainage” of users’ personal data.
This is not the first time that a large amount of personal data of Facebook users has been on the Internet. In 2019, a vulnerability discovered in the program code of the social network allowed the collection of data on users’ mobile numbers, violating the terms of use. In August of the same year, Facebook announced that the vulnerability had been fixed.
