533 million Facebook users data leaked online
Over 533 million Facebook users’ personal data have been leaked online.
The leaker on Twitter, Alon Gal @UnderTheBreach, reveals that more than half a billion Facebook records were leaked for free. Gal is the CTO and Co-Founder of the Cybercrime Intelligence Firm Hudson Rock, who discovered the data.
Gal had verified the authenticity of some of the data by comparing it against phone numbers of people he knew.
Business Insider reported that the exposed data involves users’ personal information from 106 countries, including over 32 million users in the United States, 11 million in the United Kingdom, and 6 million in India. It contains users’ phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, birthdates, locations, bios, as well as email addresses in some cases.
The entire dataset has been posted on the hacking forum for free, making it available to anyone with rudimentary data skills, said Business Insider.
All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked.
I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021
Furthermore, the leaked data was first discovered by Gal in January when a user from the same hacking forum posted an automated bot that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users in trade for a price.
This isn’t the first time that a large number of Facebook users’ data have been exposed online.
In defense, the Director of Strategic Response Communications at Facebook, Liz Bourgeois @Liz_Shepherd, posted on Twitter that this issue was resolved in 2019.
This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019. https://t.co/mPCttLkjzE
— Liz Bourgeois (@Liz_Shepherd) April 3, 2021
Stay tuned to our page for more updates.
Sources: Alon Gal (Twitter), Business Insider, Liz Bourgeois (Twitter)
