Personal data of 533 million Facebook users leaked online

Personal data of 533 million Facebook users leaked online 

Facebook has suffered another data leak, which could be its biggest one yet. According to Business Insider, the personal information of 533 million Faceook users has been posted in a low-level hacking forum. 

The personal information includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, and email addresses. Over 32 million from the U.S, 11 million from the U.K, and 6 million from India are affected. 

Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, told Insider that cybercriminals could use these information to impersonate or scam users into providing login credentials. 

The leaked data was apparently discovered in January when someone posted in the same forum about an automated bot that could deliver phone numbers of Facebook users for a price. Motherboard verified the data to be legitimate. 

While Facebook has not commented on the matter, Gal claims that there is nothing much the social media firm can do to help affected users except to warn them of possible phishing schemes or fraud. Facebook suffered a series of data breaches in the past three years. 

The company had a major security breach in September 2018 when its engineering team discovered hackers had access to personal data of over 29 million users. In December 2018, Facebook suffered another data breach as a Photo API bug exposed up to 6.8 million users’ photos to third party apps. 

Three months later, Kerbs on Security reported that Facebook stored the passwords of million of users in plain text for years. Facebook confirmed the issue and said there’s no evidence that the passwords were exposed outside of the company.