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Someone is selling access to a database of our users’ phone numbers Facebook and allows customers to easily search for these numbers using A chatbot written within the Telegram platform, according to a report published by Motherboard.
Although the data is old and several years old, it still poses a cybersecurity and privacy risk to those whose phone numbers may be exposed.
The person who advertises the service says he has data on 500 million users, and Facebook said: The data relates to a security vulnerability that the company fixed in August 2019.
And he (Alon Gal) said Alon galHudson Rock, co-founder and CTO of the cybersecurity firm, who first alerted Motherboard about the bot: Selling a database of this size to cybercrime communities is a concern.
He added: It seriously harms our privacy and is definitely used for scams and other fraudulent activities by bad actors.
And with so many databases, a certain degree of technical skill is required to find useful data.
Often times there has to be an interaction between the person who owns the database and the person trying to get information from it because the database owner will not give another person all of this valuable data.
The chatbot written in the Telegram platform solves both of these issues, so that It allows someone to find a specific person’s phone number if they have a Facebook ID, and it also finds a Facebook user’s ID if they have someone’s phone number.
And the robot allows users to enter a phone number to receive the corresponding user’s Facebook ID, or vice versa.
The initial results are reviewed from the robot, but users can purchase credits to reveal the full phone number, and the credit costs $ 20.
There are bundle pricing available as well, with one person selling 10,000 credit points for $ 5,000, according to a Motherboard report.
The bot claims to contain information about Facebook users from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and 15 other countries.
The robot has been running since at least January 12, 2021, according to screenshots released by security researcher Jal, but the data it provides access to dates back to 2019.
A few days ago, a user created a Telegram bot that allows users to query the database for a nominal fee, allowing people to find the phone numbers linked to a huge chunk of Facebook accounts.
This obviously has a huge impact on privacy. pic.twitter.com/lM1omndDET
– Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) January 14, 2021
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