The world’s biggest social media site, Facebook is under investigation again. Facebook allegedly risks its 267 million users’ personal information to a massive personal information leak.
About 267 million people using the world’s largest social media Facebook have leaked, AP, Reuters and other foreign media reported Friday.
In a report released the previous day with British security firm Comparitech, security researcher Bob Diachenko found a database of user information account. The site is a database of personal information, including IDs, names and phone numbers of 267 million Facebook users.
According to the report, about 99 percent of the leaked information are American users. While most of the others were Vietnamese.
Diachenko said the database had been open for at least 10 days since December 4th. And access to the database discontinued only five days after he informed the ISP on December 14th. The ISP manages the IP address of the server.
Worse, it was available unprotected with a download option to send to other hacker forums.
Then he warned that the information is likely to have been illegally extracted from Facebook accounts by some Vietnamese-based force. Which is open for exploitation for sending and phishing massive spam text messages.
Security experts worry that the a misuse of the information to identify users’ e-mail addresses or residence information might happen. So the misuse of identity theft can actually occur.
Facebook said in a statement that it is investigating the information leak
It is not the first time that personal information of Facebook users has leaked. Last year, the U.S. political consulting firm Cambridge Annalitica provided tens of millions of personal information collected on Facebook to Republican candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Previously this March, Facebook also admitted that hundreds of millions of personal information had leaked within the company’s internal servers for years.
Recently, Facebook has been under the spotlight for its Libra project that has been receiving many criticism.
