Phone numbers and personal information of half a billion Facebook users may have been stolen and posted online in an unprecedented security breach, Business Insider reported on Saturday.
The huge treasure trove of data was uploaded to an online forum used by hackers. Supposedly, it includes email addresses and biographical information.
Alon Gal, the co-founder and chief technology officer of private cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, first posted about a data breach on Saturday morning on social media platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn. He shared screenshots showing an online marketplace where 533 million records were being requested by a Telegram user with an edited account name.
“This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely that the phone number used for the account has been leaked,” wrote Gal. on twitter.
If each record represents a single Facebook user, as reported by Business Insider, it means that approximately 19% of the personal information of 2.8 billion individual profiles of the social media giant has been compromised. According to Gal, more than 32 million compromised records originated in the United States.
Business Insider reported that the user’s information was posted on a “low-level hacker forum”.
Social media company Menlo Park did not immediately respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.
According to the Business Insider report, the treasury of records was first obtained in 2019 because of a software “vulnerability”. The online media said it found the leak by comparing the phone numbers of well-known Facebook users with the leaked data.
Stolen personal information can be used by scammers and identity thieves.
Facebook has been the target of previous security breaches, including one involving British company Cambridge Analytica, in which the personal information of nearly 50 million Facebook users was sold and used in the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz in 2016.
Steve Rubenstein is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @SteveRubeSF