In a shocking incidence there are 533 million Facebook users' phone numbers and other personal details ‘available’ online. The data includes phone numbers, full names, location, email address, and biographical information.
The data exposed are the details including personal information of the Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and - in some cases - email addresses.
The sources said, it is not happening for the first time the data’s got exposed online. This type of data leakage happened earlier in 2019 also. The data leak was discovered by Alon Gal, CTO, Hudson Rock, a cybercrime intelligence firm.
However, A Facebook spokesperson told that the data was scraped due to a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019. The data, however, is now is reportedly available for free and could end up in the wrong hands.
An expert said, the database of this 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.
Sundar N Balasubramanian, Managing Director, Check Point Software Technologies, India & SAARC said on the Facebook data leak issue which resulted in a major breach of privacy of 533 million Facebook users from 100+ countries.
“This might be just an extension of an earlier incident with Facebook in 2019. The exposed data was based on an API permission that would allow anyone to query a user’s number. So far, the motive of publishing the data online is not clear, as there is no financial incentive in giving out the information for free. However, it is also not a new trend that Check Point is seeing. The main damage is that information about half a billion users has been leaked and is available online including their phone numbers, email addresses and location data.
Tips for users:
Activate Second Factor Authentication on all important applications!
Share and create awareness with your own family, the leak with Facebook has updated users’ details and it means that phishing campaigns might include messages from the closed ppl around you which can trick users easily.
Look on personal messages you are getting on Social Messages & emails syntax error following online translation applications.
Don’t access to links from messages or emails. If you got emails from service provider, you should manually enter to the official web site.”
