Phone numbers and personal information of half a billion Facebook users may have been stolen and posted online in an unprecedented security breach, Business Insider reported on Saturday.
The large amount of data is uploaded to an online forum used by hackers. It apparently contains email addresses and biographical information.
Alon Gal, co-founder and chief technology officer of private cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, first posted early Saturday morning on social media platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn, about the data breach. He shared screenshots showing an online marketplace in which 533 million records are requested by a Telegram user with an edited account name.
“This means that if you have a Facebook account, it probably leaked the phone number used for the account,” Gal wrote on Twitter.
If each record represents a single Facebook user, as Business Insider reported, that means about 19% of the social media giant’s personal information of 2.8 billion individual profiles has been compromised. According to Gal, more than 32 million compromised records originate in the United States.
Business Insider reported that user information was placed on a “low-level hacking forum”.
The social media company Menlo Park did not immediately respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.
According to Business Insider’s report, the collection of records was first accessed in 2019 due to a software ‘vulnerability’. The online news office said it was confirming the leak by matching known Facebook users’ phone numbers with the leaked data.
Fraudsters and identity thieves can use the stolen personal information.
Facebook has been the subject of past offenses, including the British firm Cambridge Analytica, in which the personal information of an estimated 50 million Facebook users has been sold and used by the 2016 presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz.
Steve Rubenstein is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @SteveRubeSF