They disclosed the phone numbers and personal details of 533 million Facebook users

The phone numbers and personal details of more than 500 million Facebook users were uploaded for free by a user on a low-level hacking forum, he revealed. Business intern.

The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million US user records, 11 million UK users and 6 million US users. users from India. Includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, dates of birth, biographies, and in some cases, email addresses.

Information Leaks Could Provide Valuable Data to Cybercriminals According to Alon Gal, chief technology officer at cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, which discovered the leaked data, they are using personal information to impersonate them or to scam them into giving up their credentials. connection. “A database of this size containing private information, such as the phone numbers of many Facebook users, could lead bad actors to take advantage of the data to carry out social engineering attacks or hacking attempts,” he said. said Gal to Insider. North American.

Girl first discovered the leaked data in January, when a user on the same hacking forum announced an automated bot that could provide the phone numbers of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a price. Now the dataset has been posted to the Hacking Forum for free, making it widely available to anyone with basic data knowledge.

The North American Medium examined a sample of the disclosed data and verified multiple records by comparing the phone numbers of known Facebook users to identifications in the dataset. He also checked the logs by testing email addresses from the dataset in Facebook’s password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user’s phone number.

This is not the first time that the phone numbers of a large number of Facebook users have been exposed online. A vulnerability discovered in 2019 allowed the phone numbers of millions of people to be removed from Facebook’s servers in violation of its terms of service. Facebook said the vulnerability was “patched” in August 2019.

Facebook previously vowed to take action after Cambridge Analytica disclosed the data of 80 million users in violation of Facebook’s terms of service to target voters with political ads in the 2016 election.

Gal said that from a security perspective, there is little that Facebook could do to help users affected by the breach because their data was already exposed, but added that Facebook should let users know so they can stay tuned for possible Phishing the frauds with your personal data. “People who sign up with a business like Facebook trust them with their data and Facebook is supposed to treat it with the utmost respect. “Said Gal. “Leaking users’ personal information is a huge breach of trust and must be dealt with accordingly,” he said.

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