The personal data of more than half a billion Facebook users has been compromised. Local media reported on Monday that the data includes personal information, phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations e.t.c.
According to Facebook spokesperson Liz Shepherd: “This is old data that was previously reported in 2019.” They added, “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
The leaked data can be used by criminals to commit identity fraud and identity theft related crimes. The data vulnerability was first discovered and resolved by Facebook in 2019 which had allowed criminals to scrape phone numbers of users off of Facebook’s servers which was in direct violation of the terms of service of Facebook. This has not been the first instance of data theft from Facebook’s server. In 2016, Cambridge Analytica scraped data of 80 million Facebook users to target voters with targeted political ads for the 2016 elections in the United States.
Israeli information security and cyber crime expert, Alon Gal, has expressed doubts over Facebook’s stance on the data leak issue. “Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking, and marketing,” Gal stated.
The leaked data include records of 32 million users in the United States, 11 million users in the United Kingdom, and six million users in India.
Facebook: Data of 533 million users made public
