According to a report by the website Insider, last month the personal data of millions of Facebook users was published on a low-level hacking forum for free.
The breached data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million users in the US, 11 million in the UK, and 6 million in India. The data includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses.
Insider reviewed a sample of the data by matching known user’s phone numbers with the IDs in the data set and confirmed them to be real Facebook profiles.
A Facebook spokesperson told Insider that the data had been scraped as a result of a security vulnerability in their systems which the company patched in 2019.
Alan Gal, the chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence firm, Hudson Rock, who first flagged the leak, said in a tweet that cybercriminals could use the data for hacking, scamming and social engineering.
Gal said that Facebook couldn’t do much to reverse the damage done as the data was already available online, however, it could warn users to be alert to scams or frauds that they used their data.
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