A group claims they are offering information on more than 500 million Facebook users – including phone numbers and other data – virtually for free.
Report by Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cyber crime intelligence firm Hudson Rock said on Saturday that he had verified the authenticity of at least some of the data by comparing it against phone numbers of people he knew.
“While a couple of years old, the leaked data could provide valuable information to cyber criminals who use people’s personal information to impersonate them or scam them into handing over login credentials” Lon Gal stated.
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Other journalists say they have also been able to match known phone numbers to the details in the data dump.
Authorities stated that they were not immediately able to vet the information, which is being offered for cryptocurrency on a site for hackers.
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In a statement, Facebook said that the data was “very old” and related to an issue that it had fixed in August 2019.
The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India.
It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and in some cases their email addresses too.
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This is not the first time that a huge number of Facebook users’ phone numbers have been found exposed online.
The vulnerability that was uncovered in 2019 the vulnerability allowed millions of phone numbers of users to be scrapped from Facebook servers in violation of its terms of service.