Personal Data Leaked Online Of Over 500M Facebook User Accounts

Personal Data Leaked Online Of Over 500M Facebook User Accounts.

Personal data, including phone numbers, of over 553 million Facebook users have been published online for free by a user in a low-level hacking forum, according to Business Insider. At least 100 countries are included in this leak, with data from 32 million users in the U.S. and 11 million users in the UK.

This very serious breach contains mobile phone numbers, Fb IDs, full names, areas, birthdates, bios, and in some instances electronic mail addresses.

Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who first discovered the leaked data on Saturday, said to Business Insider,

“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.”

It’s not the first time Facebook has its users’ data leaked online. In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg’s company was involved in a controversial situation regarding privacy issues and confirmed that thousands of developers had been able to access data from inactive users, which is unexpected behaviour.

Before that, there was the Cambridge Analytica controversy, in which the company not only got access to the data of anyone who gave permission to a third-party ‘personality quiz,’ but Facebook allowed the app some access to the data of their friends also.

The company has not yet commented on this new data leak, but it could well be the worst leak Facebook’s ever been involved in.

Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat most hacked social media accounts

FACEBOOK, Instagram and Snapchat are the most hacked social media accounts, with phishing messages being the most common tactic used by cybercriminals to lure unsuspecting victims.

Between February 2020 and February 2021, the National Fraud & Cyber Crime Reporting Centre, ActionFraud, received 15,214 reports about email and social media account hacking.