WASHINGTON – Data affecting more than 500 million Facebook users that was originally leaked in 2019, including email addresses and phone numbers, has been posted on an online hackers’ forum, according to media reports and a cybercrime expert.
“All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free,” Alon Gal, chief technology officer at the Hudson Rock cybercrime intelligence firm, tweeted yesterday.
He denounced what he called the “absolute negligence” of Facebook.
Some of the data appears to be current, according to a report by Business Insider that AFP was unable to confirm independently.
It said some of the leaked phone numbers still belong to the owners of Facebook accounts.
“This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked,” said Gal.
However, Facebook said the reports are old news.
“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” a company spokesman told AFP.
“We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
Close to 32 million United States and 20 million French accounts were among those affected, Gal tweeted in January, when the person holding the data was trying to sell it.
The data includes phone numbers, complete names, birth dates, and for some accounts, email addresses and relationship status.
“Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking and marketing,” said Gal on Twitter.
This is not the first time that a leak or use of data from the world’s largest social network – with nearly two billion users – has embroiled Facebook in controversy.
In 2016, a scandal around Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm that used the personal data of millions of Facebook users to target political ads, cast a shadow over the social network and its handling of private information. – AFP, April 4, 2021
