The personal information of 533 million Facebook users has been leaked and posted online in a forum for free.
The leak was discovered by Alan Gal, the CTO of Hudson Rock, a cybercrime intelligence firm on April 3rd. Gal notes that the leaked information includes phone numbers, locations, past locations, birth dates, email addresses and other personal data.
“All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for that account was leaked,” Gal tweeted.
All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked.
I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021
The social media giant has acknowledged the breach in a statement sent to media but says that the data is old.
“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.
Gal released information about the number of users affected by country and has revealed that 3,494,285 users in Canada were affected by the breach.
He notes that it’s possible for bad actors to use the leaked information for social engineering, scamming, hacking and marketing.
Source: Alon Gal (@UnderTheBreach)