There were reports last week of a data breach at Facebook, personal data from over 533 million Facebook users has been stolen and posted to a hacking website.533 million 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 – email addresses.
Facebook Inc also stated that it was not confident it had full visibility on which users would need to be notified ,saying said it also took into account the fact that users could not fix the issue and that the data was publicly available in deciding not to notify users.
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Facebook has said it plugged the hole after identifying the problem at the time.
Experts stated that about 33 million Americans on Facebook now have their personal data available for free on a website where it is easily accessible to identity thieves. Including the data of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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The leaked data could provide valuable information to cyber criminals who use people’s personal information for impersonation with the end game of scamming them.
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“A database of that size containing private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks hacking attempts,” Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson rock stated.
You can head over here to check if your data was breached too.