The personal data of 533 million Facebook users has been leaked online, said Hudson Rock CTO of cybercrime intel Alon Gal.
Business Insider was able to verify part of the leaked information.
A user on a hacking forum has records of Facebook users from 106 countries. Out of the 533 million Facebook users whose data was exposed, 32+ million belongs to users in the United States. Other countries have higher numbers of users such as Tunisia (with 39+ million), Italy (with 35+ million), and Egypt (44+ million).
The specific information obtained features full names, birthdates, Facebook ID numbers, older locations, email addresses, occupations, marital status, and city and country of residence of users.
“A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts,” Gal said.
Even though the recent discovery made yesterday has data from two years ago, it can still be useful for cybercriminals attempting to obtain login credentials of many users’ accounts. The vulnerability that led to the exposure of information was patched in August of 2019 according to Facebook.
The leaked data seems to come from a dataset that was discovered in January. That dataset, discovered by Gal, was available to anyone for a price. The website Motherboard verified the data was legit.
This is not the first time the data of Facebook users has been exposed and it may not be the last one.
https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/1378314424239460352
[Sources]: Business Insider: 533 million Facebook users’ phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online. – [Archive]. @UnderTheBreach: All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free – [Archive].