More than 500 million accounts hacked. User data including IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, and email addresses available on hacker’s website.
As per Facebook spokesperson, “This is old data that was previously reported in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019”.
Data leak was first discovered by a firm called Hudson Rock on Saturday. As per Hudson Rock “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,”.
Though the leaked data is a few years old, it could provide hackers valuable personal information such as phone numbers and email addresses, which over the period remain same and could possibly lead to phishing schemes or fraud.
The exposed user data is from 106 countries, including 32 million users from US,11 million from UK, and 6 million from India.
According to Alon Gal, CTO Hudson Rock, Facebook users should be alert to “social engineering attacks” by people who may have obtained their phone numbers or other private data in the coming months.