According to Alon Gal, CTO of cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock, there are records for more than 32 million accounts in the United States, 11 million in the United Kingdom and 6 million in India.
In some cases, it contains the full name, location, birthday, email addresses, phone number, and relationship status.
Hudson Rock showed CNN Business the phone numbers of two seniors listed in the database.
The leak was first reported by the news website Insider.
“These are old data previously reported in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told CNN on Saturday.
Facebook did not say whether it affected users at the time.
Stone added: ‘In 2019, we removed people’s ability to find others directly using their phone number on Facebook and Instagram – a feature that can be used using a sophisticated software code, to mimic Facebook and give a phone number to find which users it belongs to. on. ”
Although these data are from 2019, they may still be of value to hackers and cybercriminals such as those who engage in theft.
Alon Gal of Hudson Rock pointed out on Twitter that the way the data was sorted and posted on the hacking website this week makes it much more accessible for criminals to exploit.
Rachel Tobac, an ethical hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security, told CNN: “These are the pieces of data that cybercriminals spend searching for attacks on social engineering (a kind of hacking) – but now they’re all on one place and easily accessible in this leak, which makes social engineering faster and easier. ‘