A cybercriminal created a bot that sold access to millions of cellphone numbers for Facebook users via the Telegram messaging app, a new report says.
The bot extracted information from a huge database of phone numbers taken from Facebook before the social network fixed a security breach in 2019, according to Motherboard.
A Telegram support representative told the Post that the bot was blocked on Tuesday morning. But it is unclear when exactly it was disabled and for how long it was active on the platform.
Anyone who pulled the Telegram profile from the bot could enter the Facebook ID of the person they are looking for and the bot would search for the corresponding phone number, the agency said on Monday. Supposedly, it also worked in another way – enter a phone number and the bot would retrieve the corresponding Facebook ID.
But there was a problem – the bot initially hid most of the phone number and forced users to pay to see the whole thing, according to the report. Prices reportedly range from $ 20 for a single “credit” to $ 5,000 for 10,000 credits.
The unidentified person who created the bot said he could access the phone numbers of 533 million Facebook users in dozens of countries, according to Alon Gal cyber security firm Hudson Rock, who discovered it about two weeks ago.
“It is important for Facebook to notify its users of this breach, so that they are less likely to fall victim to different attempts by hackers and social engineering,” Gal told Motherboard.
Facebook said the data stemmed from a previous security issue that allowed cyber attacks to compare phone numbers to user profiles using sophisticated software code.
“This data is old,” a Facebook spokesman told The Post via email. “We found and fixed this problem in August 2019.”
The Telegram bot did not return any correspondence when Facebook tried to compare it with data from more recent users, added the technology giant.
But that doesn’t help people who linked their phone numbers to their Facebook accounts before the problem was fixed, Motherboard noted. The social network already had more than 1.6 billion daily active users in September 2019.
The bot appeared on Telegram when the encrypted messaging service saw an increase in the number of users amid concerns about Facebook’s changes to the privacy policy of WhatsApp, its own messaging app. WhatsApp postponed the implementation of the policy.