Facebook data on 533 million users leaked online

A hacker has reportedly posted personal data from 533 million Facebook accounts online.

File photo: Facebook

Massive personal data is now uploaded on a hacking forum

According to a source, the leak includes information like phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birth dates, bios, and in some cases email addresses.

A CTO of a security firm, Alon Gal, reported the data leak and he also posted the number of affected accounts by country. His list showed that the US had 32.3 million affected users while the UK had 11.5 million.

Gal first discovered the leaked information in January when a user in the same hacking forum advertised an automated bot that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users. Motherboard reported that the bot really exists at the time and verified that the data was accurate.

Allegedly, the hacker was part of a low-level hacking forum and posted the information online. The data was accessed via a Telegram bot. Facebook said the leak involved "old" data stemming from an issue that they already addressed last August 2019.

However, Gal explained that the leaked data could still provide valuable information to cybercriminals even it was two years ago. With this much information, they can impersonate the account's owner or perform scams by handing over log-in credentials.

As of the moment, the entire dataset has been posted on the hacking forum for free, thus it widely available to anyone with basic data skills. Gal noted that Facebook cannot do much to resolve this problem since the data already circulated. He added that the best thing that they can do is to alert the users of spam calls and fraud.

Any thoughts on this issue?

Sources: Gizmodo, Business Insider