Facebook again faces data breach, this time over 500 million users affected

Data of over 500 (almost 50 crore users) million Facebook users were made public on Saturday. The data was exposed for free by a hacker in a hacking forum and included details like phone numbers and other personal data. The personal information of millions of users from across 106 countries, including India, was exposed.

The exposed data included details like phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and even email addresses of some users. Over 32 million accounts in the US, 11 million in the UK, and 6 million in India were exposed, BI reported.

A Facebook spokesperson said that the leaked data was scrapped due to a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019. A vulnerability was discovered in 2019 that allowed phone numbers of millions of users to be scraped from Facebook servers. The social media giant said that the vulnerability was patched in August 2019.

Even though the leaked data is a couple of years old, it could provide valuable information to cybercriminals, said Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock who first discovered the leaked data online on Saturday.

"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," said Gal to the news site.

Some of the data appeared to be current, while some of the leaked phone numbers belong to owners of Facebook accounts.

Also Read: Bigbasket Data Breach; Around 20 Million Users Data Affected

According to Gal, there is not much that Facebook could do at this point except for informing users that their data is out in the open so that users could remain vigilant in the future.

Gal said that individuals who have signed up for a reputable company like Facebook are trusting them with their data and Facebook is supposed to treat them with the utmost respect. The leak of user information is a huge breach of trust and must be handled accordingly, he said.

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