The phone numbers and personal data of 553 million Facebook users have been published online for free in a low-level hacking forum.
The phone numbers and personal data of 553 million Facebook users have been published online for free in a low-level hacking forum.
Gal first uncovered the leaked data in January when a user in the same hacking forum advertised an automated bot that could deliver phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users in exchange for a price.
Motherboard reported on that bot's existence at the time and verified that the data was legitimate.
Now, the entire dataset has been posted on the hacking forum for free, making it widely available to anyone with rudimentary data skills.
The exposed data includes details like Facebook IDs, contact numbers, full names, birthdates, locations, bios and even email addresses of some users.
According to a Business Insider report, over 32 million accounts in the US, 6 million in India and 11 million in the UK were exposed.
Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified several records by matching known Facebook users' phone numbers with the IDs listed in the data set. We also verified records by testing email addresses from the data set in Facebook's password reset feature, which can be used to reveal a user's phone number partially.
A Facebook spokesperson told Insider that the data was scrapped due to a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019.
Insider tried to reach the leaker through messaging app Telegram but did not get a response.
“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 Insider.
“Individuals signing up to a reputable company like Facebook are trusting them with their data, and Facebook [is] supposed to treat the data with the utmost respect," Gal said. "Users having their personal information leaked is a huge breach of trust and should be handled accordingly."
This is not the first time that a huge number of Facebook user’s contact numbers have been found exposed online.
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