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A cybercriminal created a bot that sold access to millions of mobile phone numbers of Facebook users through the Telegram messaging app, according to a new report.
The bot pulled information from a massive database of phone numbers taken from Facebook before the social network fixed a security breach in 2019, according to Motherboarre.
A Telegram support representative told The Post that the bot was blocked on Tuesday morning. But it’s unclear exactly when it was disabled and how long it was active on the platform.
Anyone who retrieves the bot’s Telegram profile can enter the wanted person’s Facebook ID and the bot retrieves the corresponding phone number, the outlet reported on Monday. It would also have worked the other way around: enter a phone number and the bot will retrieve the Facebook ID that matches it.
But there was a catch – the bot initially hid most of the phone number and forced users to pay to see everything, according to the report. Prices would range from $ 20 for a single “credit” to $ 5,000 for 10,000 credits.
The unidentified person who created the bot claimed that he could access the phone numbers of 533 million Facebook users in dozens of countries, according to Alon Gal from cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, who spotted him about two weeks ago.
“It is important that Facebook inform its users of this breach so that they are less likely to fall victim to various hacking and social engineering attempts,” Gal told Motherboard.
Facebook said the data came from a previous security issue that allowed cyber attackers to match phone numbers to user profiles using sophisticated software code.
“This is old data,” a Facebook spokesperson told the Post in an email. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
The Telegram bot returned no matches when Facebook attempted to compare it to data from more recent users, the tech giant added.
But that doesn’t help people who linked their phone numbers to their Facebook accounts before the issue was resolved, Motherboard noted. The social network already had more than 1.6 billion daily active users in September 2019.
The bot appeared on Telegram as the encrypted messaging service saw an increase in user numbers amid concerns about Facebook’s changes to the privacy policy of WhatsApp, its own messaging app. WhatsApp has pushed back the rollout of the policy.
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