Personal data of more than 500 Million Facebook users have been leaked by a Hacker. The Hackers got access to the private information of so many people from all over the world and leaked it online in a low-level hacking forum. Let’s talk about this Facebook data leak;
Facebook data leak.
This is a huge leak by a user in a low-level hacking forum, they have stolen the private information of millions of people from Facebook. The data have been leaked for free online and this includes 106 countries like the UK, the US, and even Pakistan. The leaked data includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and email addresses.
A sample of the leaked data was verified several records by matching known Facebook users’ phone numbers with the IDs listed in the data set. It was also verified records by testing email addresses from the data set in Facebook’s password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user’s phone number. A Facebook spokesperson reported that the data was scrapped due to a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019. Millions of users have lost their data to the internet and Facebook says that the platform is still not secure even after the countless patches? So what if the data is a little bit old, it can still be used in countless ways and scams! Who knows what goes on the internet that we haven’t discovered yet.
According to Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who first discovered the entire trough of leaked data online on Saturday and shared the information on Twitter. “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 told.
Gal first discovered the leaked data in January when a user in the same hacking forum advertised a bot that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a low price, But now, the whole dataset has been posted on the hacking forum for free, making it widely available to anyone with rudimentary data skills to use.
This isn’t the first time
This is not the first time that a huge number of Facebook users’ phone numbers have been leaked online. The vulnerability that was uncovered in 2019 allowed millions of people’s phone numbers to be scraped from Facebook’s servers in violation of its terms of service. Facebook said that vulnerability was patched in August 2019. Even Facebook was also proved guilty of tracking users without their permission, they tracked users’ location as well as their device for ad placements. Facebook previously promised to crack down on mass data-scraping after Cambridge Analytica scraped the data of 80 million users in violation of Facebook’s terms of service to target voters with political ads in the 2016 election.
There’s not much Facebook can do to help users affected by the breach since their data is already out in the open, Facebook could notify users so they can remain alert, or Facebook can still work on protecting users’ privacy on their huge platform. Facebook should take the privacy of its users seriously and work on these bugs or patches. What do you guys say? What would you do if your data got leaked? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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