Hackers leak the personal information of over 500 million Facebook users
Over 500 million Facebook users’ personal data, majorly from India, UK, and the US, has been leaked by a hacker on a low-level hack forum.
The data leaked includes many things such as full names, biographies, phone numbers, birth dates, Facebook IDs, and email addresses. The leaked information is not recent though, as the data is from 2019 when Facebook fixed the vulnerability that caused the leak. Although the information is from nearly over two years ago, the whole leak has recently surfaced.
Facebook users can face hacking attempts or social engineering attacks
Alon Gal, who is the CTO of Hudson Rock, found a fraction of that data earlier in this January. He discovered an automated bot that operated on Telegram which sold phone numbers of Facebook users for a price, and the source of those numbers are the Facebook leak that affected hundreds of millions of users. As we said, this was only a fraction before, but now the whole list is available on a low-level hacking forum. Gal explained how this data could be used maliciously, citing the possible attempts to perform social engineering attacks. Here’s what he said to BusinessInsider:
“A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts.”
People can try to impersonate others with the leaked data that is legit and available for everyone and try to perform social engineering attacks as Gal said. Because of that, it’s best to be extra cautious right now.
Gal earlier shared detailed information about the leak on Twitter, including how the bot works and the list of countries of users affected by the attack. The leak has been worldwide, and there’s virtually every country there. “This obviously has a huge impact on privacy,” he said in his earlier tweet.
