Facebook Hacked: Facebook admitted personal information of 533 million Facebook users leaked online for free
Nickie Louise
Posted On April 3, 2021
Personal information of over 533 million Facebook users was leaked on a low-level hacking forum in one of the largest cyber data breaches ever reported. The data breach was first discovered on Saturday by Alon Gal, CTO of Hudson Rock, a cybercrime intelligence firm. The latest data leak could potentially undermine Facebook’s business model of gathering and selling a large amount of users’ personal information as targeted ads to marketers.
Later this evening, Facebook also confirmed that the phone numbers and personal data of more than 500 million of its users has been posted online by a low-level hacker in a forum for free. A Facebook spokesperson wrote in an email statement, “This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
The leaked data includes Facebook user data from 106 countries, including more than 32 million users in the US, 11 million in the UK, and 6 million in India, had their Facebook IDs, full names, phone numbers, locations, birthdates, bios, and in some cases, email addresses.
Facebook users’ data published in the forum verified several records by matching known Facebook users’ phone numbers with the IDs listed and confirmed other 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.
In a tweet, Alon Gal wrote:
“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.”
https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/1378314424239460352
In another tweet, Gal added that “bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking, and marketing.”
https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/1378315550103863298
Gal also posted a full list of affected users by country.
https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/1349674272227266563
This is news is still developing. Please check back for updates later.
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