Over 500 million Facebook users’ personal information posted on a hacking forum

The personal information of 533 million Facebook users has been posted on a hacking forum for free, as reported by Insider.

The leaked data includes phone numbers, email addresses, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, bios and birthdays of 533 million Facebook accounts from 106 countries. It includes more than 32 million records on users in the United States, 11 million on users in the United Kingdom and 6 million on users in India.

Also Read: 267 Million Facebook Identities Sold For $540 On Dark Web

Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, said that the exposed data was previously reported back in 2019 and the company fixed the vulnerability that enabled it. “This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,”

“In 2019, we removed people’s ability to directly find others using their phone number across both Facebook and Instagram – a function that could be exploited using sophisticated software code, to imitate Facebook and provide a phone number to find which users it belonged to.”

However, according to Alon Gal who is the CTO of cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock and who discovered the breach on Saturday, the leaked data could still be valuable for cyber criminals

“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,” he said. 

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