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| Publish the data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users |
Free online posting by users on forums to leak personal information with hundreds of millions of Facebook platform users.
This data is another example of the large amount of information collected by Facebook and other social media sites and limits the security of this information.
The data includes personal information from 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries / territories, including 32 million user records in the United States, 11 million users in the United Kingdom and 6 million users in India.
This includes phone number, Facebook ID, full name, location, date of birth, bio, and, in some cases, email address.
A Facebook spokesperson said: This is old data reported in 2019. We detected this issue and fixed it in August 2019.
Although the leaked data is two years old, it provides valuable information to cybercriminals who use personal information to impersonate or deceive people into revealing their credentials.
Alon Gal, chief technology officer at Hudson Rock, a cybercrime intelligence firm, said that a database of this size contains private information, such as the phone numbers of many Facebook users, that criminals use to carry out social engineering or hacking attacks.
Gall first discovered the leaked data in January when hacker forum users themselves announced an automated bot that could provide phone numbers to hundreds of millions of Facebook users.
Now the entire dataset is posted for free on hacker forums so that everyone can use it at scale.
It should be noted that this is not the first time that the phone numbers of a large number of Facebook users have been found online.
The vulnerability discovered in 2019 allowed millions of phone numbers to be collected on Facebook servers, in violation of Facebook's Terms of Use.
After Cambridge Analytica collected data from more than 80 million users, Facebook violated the above "Terms of Use", targeting the 2016 elections and targeting voters through political ads.
Gal said: For security reasons, there are many steps Facebook cannot take to help users who have experienced a data breach due to their data exposure. However, the company can remind users to be cautious about phishing behavior.