Hackers allegedly shared a large amount of personal Facebook data in January, and it now appears to have escaped into the wild. According to Business Insider, said security researcher Alon Gal discover that a user on a hacking forum made the entire dataset public, exposing details to approximately 533 million Facebook members. The data includes phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses and locations, among other information.
About 32 million of the users are in the US, while 11 million are from the UK and another 6 million from India.
Gal first noticed the data in January, when Telegram users were able to pay to search the database. The intruders allegedly made use of an error that Facebook corrected in August 2019 and apparently contained information from before the correction. Maybe you are not in trouble if you are a relative newcomer or the key details have changed in the time since the correction, but the offense still leaves many people defenseless.
We asked Facebook for comment.
As Gal noted, Facebook can only do so much if the data is already in circulation and the related error is no longer an issue. However, the social network can notify affected users, and there is pressure on the company to alert affected users so that they can keep an eye out for possible spam and fraud.
All 533,000,000 Facebook records have just been leaked for free.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is likely that the phone number used for the account has been leaked.
I have yet to see Facebook acknowledge this absolute negligence of your data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8
– Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) 3 April 2021