Phone Numbers, Email Addresses Are Part Of Facebook Data That Has Been Leaked Online

Time and time again, Facebook is under the spotlight for leaked data that amounts to over 500 million people from over 20 countries. “The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India,” according to Insider. “It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.”

Facebook told Insider that this data was scraped because of a vulnerability that it fixed in 2019. The company gave a similar answer to Motherboard in January. “This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” Facebook told BleepingComputer. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”

While a couple of years old, the leaked data could provide valuable information to cybercriminals who use people’s personal information to impersonate them or scam them into handing over login credentials, according to Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock , who first discovered the entire trough of leaked data online on Saturday.

from a security standpoint, there is not much Facebook can do to help users affected by the breach since their data is already out in the open, but they could notify users so they could remain vigilant for possible phishing schemes or fraud using their personal data.

There will be a follow up article, showing what to do if your Facebook account might part of the list of breached ones.