Data, including phone numbers, of 61 lakh Indian Facebook users leaked online
The data of around 61 lakh Indian Facebook users, including name and phone numbers, have been leaked online.
By Newsmeter Network Published on 4 April 2021 12:14 PM GMT
Hyderabad: The data of around 61 lakh Indian Facebook users, including name and phone numbers, have been leaked online. The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries.
Alon Gal, the CTO of the security firm Hudson Rock, tweeted about the data dump. He posted a list of affected users by country. According to his list, 32.3 million users were affected in the US and 11.5 million in the UK. The data was accessed via a Telegram bot.
"All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked," said Gal
The leaked info includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and in some cases email addresses. Other data points in the posting included gender, location, and job status. The entire dataset has been posted on the hacking forum for free, making it widely available to anyone with rudimentary data skills.
The data is reportedly broken up into download packages by country.
With the Facebook data out in the public, it's safe to expect it to be used for cybercrime.
"This is old data that was previously reported in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019," said Facebook in a statement.
After Facebook's statement, Gal tweeted, "I tested the phone numbers of several individuals who deleted their accounts between 2013-2018 and none appeared in the leak, I believe Facebook did delete entries from individuals who deleted their accounts which is good to know! If anything changes I'll update."
Earlier Facebook had vowed to crack down on mass data-scraping after Cambridge Analytica scraped the data of 80 million users in violation of Facebook's terms of service to target voters with political ads in the 2016 election.
