533 Million Phone Numbers and Personal Data from Facebook Leaked on a Hacker Forum

By
Shawn Ambrose
-

As everyone knows, if you’re under the age of 45, it’s socially illegal to use Facebook.

Younger users have moved to Instagram and TikTok in recent years, making Mark Zuckerberg dab his tears away with thousand-dollar bills.

But here’s the thing; after moving to other social media apps, did you delete your Facebook account?

Many of us haven’t used it in ages, but have simply deactivated the account temporarily instead of deleting it.

And if this is what you did, I have some bad news for you.

533 Million Phone Numbers and Personal Data from Facebook Leaked on a Hacker Forum

A leaker who was feeling rather generous on Saturday (3 Apr) published the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online in a hacking forum.

More than 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries were compromised, according to Business Insider. 

The personal information includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and even email addresses in some instances.

Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, was the one who discovered the data breach on Saturday.

He posted a list of all the countries affected by the hacking on his Twitter account.

In Singapore alone, more than 3 million accounts were breached.

What Can Be Done With The Information?

In response to the incident, Facebook said that the data was “very old” and related to an issue that it had fixed in August 2019.

However, as Gal noted, while the leaked data is old, it could enable cybercriminals to impersonate users or scam them into handing over login credentials.

“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 Business Insider. 

Gal urged Facebook users to be vigilant of  “social engineering attacks” by those who may have obtained their phone numbers or other personal data in the coming months.

Unfortunately, Gal said that there’s not much Facebook can do to help users affected by the breach since their data has already been published in a public forum.

Similar Security Lapse in 2019

A similar security breach occurred in 2019, where a large number of Facebook users had their phone numbers extracted and published online.

Some of the personal information even had a user’s name, gender and location by country.

At that time, too, Facebook said the data stolen was “old”.

Maybe the young ones are right. Maybe it’s time to move on from Facebook to TikTok, where nothing bad ever happens, right?

Right?

Featured Image: Image: Twitter (Alon Gal (Under the Breach))

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Shawn Ambrose
Email: [email protected]