Hundreds of millions of Facebook user data have been leaked. This data is owned by users from various countries.
The information was disclosed by the CTO of cyber crime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, Alon Gal. The number of leaked user data reached 533 million users from 106 countries.
“The database contains personal information such as the cellphone numbers of many Facebook users that the perpetrator uses to take advantage of the data to carry out social engineering attacks or hacking attempts,” said Alon Gal, quoted by Business Insider, Monday (5/4/2021).
Gal discovered a data leak in January. That is when a user on a hacking forum advertises an automated bot that can sell the cell phone numbers of hundreds of millions of Facebook users.
Motherboard has reported the bot’s presence, and confirmed the data presented is valid.
Currently the entire dataset is uploaded on hacking forums for free. That way makes it even more accessible to anyone with rudimentary data skills.
Insiders also tried to contact data leaks via Telegram. However, until now there has been no response.
This is not the first time this has happened on Facebook. Previously in 2019 it was found that millions of users’ phone numbers were taken from company servers.
For this time, Facebook said it originated from the 2019 vulnerability. The vulnerability was also patched by the company owned by Mark Zuckerberg in the same year.
User Data Leaked from 106 Countries
Alon Gal revealed all of his findings on his Twitter account @UnderTheBreach. There are 106 countries whose user data was exposed in this incident.
One of them is Indonesia with a total of 130,331 users. Meanwhile, there are other countries such as the US with 32 million, Britain with 11 million and India with 6 million.
The data consists of cellphone number, Facebook ID, full name, date of birth, and bio. And in some cases there are also email address leaks.
The Insider tried a number of samples from the leaked data. Multiple records were verified by matching the user’s mobile number with the ID list in the data set.
In addition, Insiders also verify records by testing the email address from the data set in the password reset feature. This can be done to reveal most of the user’s cell phone numbers.
Denial of Facebook
Facebook itself denies any personal data leakage of more than 500 million users. A Facebook spokesman said the news of the leak was old data previously reported in 2019.
“We found and managed to fix this problem in August 2019,” said a Facebook spokesperson.
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