More than 500 million Facebook users’ personal data has been leaked

Facebook Data Leak

A popular cybercrime website has leaked the personal details of about 533 million Facebook users worldwide.

According to the available information, the leaked data has been stolen through a Facebook vulnerability that hackers have exploited back in 2019.

Names, Facebook IDs, cell phone numbers, email addresses, gender, profession, nationality, locations, marital status, and other profile details have appeared on the hacking site for free.

It has been reported that more than 32 million of the records belong to US users, 11 million records are from UK users, and nearly six million records belong to Indian users.  In total, the data leak reveals the details of users from 106 countries worldwide.

Researchers reveal that the theft of this much personal information has happened through the exploitation of a vulnerability of Facebook that enables automated scripts to scrape public accounts and related private phone numbers.  

Facebook’s spokesperson Liz Bourgeois has commented on the data leak in a tweet where he explains that the information that has been published online is old data that has been reported in 2019. According to his statement, the company has discovered and resolved this problem in August 2019.

Regardless of the fact that the leaked information is not new, many researchers and users are expressing their concerns regarding Facebook’s ability to provide adequate data protection.

At the same time, scraping Facebook profiles is a really lucrative business for threat actors and cybercriminals.

Security professionals are warning that, with the personal details of nearly 533 million Facebook users freely accessible on the web, malicious actors can now easily unleash their arsenal of social engineering tactics, online scams, and other types of frauds to attack users individually or in special targeted campaigns.  

This being said, anyone who has shared their email and phone number with Facebook and hasn’t changed them since 2019 is advised to be on the watch for potential attempts of hacking attacks, spam calls, and other online frauds.