Hackers were sharing a large amount of personal data from Facebook in January, and now that data appears to have escaped into the world. According to Business Insider, security researcher Alon Gal has uncovered that a user on a hacking forum has made the entire data set public, exposing details of about 533 million Facebook members. The data includes phone numbers, dates of birth, e-mail addresses and locations, among other revealing information.
About 32 million users are in the United States, while 11 million are from the United Kingdom and another 6 million are from India.
Gal first discovered the data in January, when Telegram users could pay to search the database. The attackers reportedly took advantage of a flaw that Facebook fixed in August 2019 and includes information prior to this fix. You may not be in trouble if you are a relative newbie or if you have changed important details since the fix, but the breach still leaves many people vulnerable.
We asked for a comment on Facebook.
As Gal noted, Facebook can only do so much when data is already in circulation and the related failure is no longer an issue. The social network can notify affected users, however, and there is pressure on the company to alert affected users so they can watch for possible spam and fraud calls.
All 533 million Facebook records were leaked for free.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely that the phone number used for the account has been leaked.
I have yet to see Facebook recognizing this absolute neglect of its data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8
– Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021