Facebook Data Leak: In a massive privacy breach, personal data of about 533 million users from 106 countries have reportedly been leaked online for free on low-level hacking forums.
As per reports, several records that contained personal information were leaked. Personal information includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birthdates, locations, full names, bios, and even email addresses in a few cases.
In India, records of about 6 million users were leaked and posted online. Besides this, more than 32 million and 11 million records were discovered to be of the users residing in the US and UK, respectively.
Facebook Data Leak: What happened?
The newest set of compromised data was scrapped because of a vulnerability that Facebook patched in 2019. Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock reported in a tweet that all 533,000,000 records abused because of a security vulnerability that allowed viewing the phone number that was associated with the Facebook account were exposed online for free.
This suggests that the leaked personal data of more than 533 million Facebook users are out there and can be abused by hackers to perform hacking attempts or social engineering attacks. Possibly one of the most significant concerns is that it lets users search for a Facebook user’s phone number.
But, please note that Facebook hasn’t released an official statement till now and it is not clear that the data of the users have been exploited.
Even though the data is somewhat older, a major part of it continues to be relevant given the fact that there is little possibility that users don’t change their email id or phone number linked with their account each and every year.
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