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Another day, another data break involving Facebook.
According to a report on TechCrunch, the social network may have inadvertently revealed millions of phone numbers related to people's Facebook accounts.
The online publication indicates that an exposed server found online "contained more than 419 million records on several user databases, spread across different geographic regions, including 133 million of them." registrations on Facebook users based in the United States, 18 million user registrations in the United Kingdom and another with more than 50 TechCrunch added that in the absence of password protection any user could access the data.
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Facebook issued a statement in the United States today in which it stated, "This dataset is old and seems to contain information obtained before we made any changes last year to prevent users from finding information." other people using their phone numbers. The dataset was deleted and we found no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised. "
On April 4, 2018, Mike Schroepfer, the company's chief technology officer, discussed these changes as part of a publication in Facebook's press room, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the advertising marketing firm who worked for President Trump and participated in misappropriation. of 87 million Facebook users.
"Until today, people could enter the phone number or the email address of another person in the search on Facebook to help find it. This has been particularly useful for finding your friends in languages that require more effort to type a full name, or in which many people have the same name, "wrote Schroepfer at the time. "However, malicious actors have also abused these features to retrieve public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses already in their possession through search and account recovery. Given the breadth and sophistication of the activity we saw, we believe that most Facebook users could have seen their public profile altered in this way. We have disabled this feature. "
Facebook also thinks that, due to numerous duplicates, the total number of phone numbers found online represents more than about half of the total number reported by TechCrunch, which still represents a significant amount.
TechCrunch reported that it checked a number of records in the database by comparing the phone number of a known Facebook user with his Facebook ID listed. Some records also included the user's name, sex and location by country.
Before it was dismantled, the database was discovered by Sanyam Jain, a security researcher, who then contacted TechCrunch. Jain said he found profiles associated with celebrities.
It is still unclear who might have scraped the data.
Facebook has been hit by a series of privacy and data scandals. In July, the Federal Trade Commission fined the company $ 5 billion for violating consumers' right to privacy.
Email: [email protected]; Follow @edbaig on Twitter
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