The hackers reportedly shared a massive amount of Facebook personal data in January, and now this data seems to have escaped into the wild. According to at Business intern, security researcher Alon Gal has discovered that a user on a hacking forum made the dataset public, revealing details for approximately 533 million Facebook members. The data includes phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, and locations, among other revealing information.
About 32 million users are in the United States, while 11 million are from the United Kingdom and another 6 million are from India.
Gal first spotted the data in January, when Telegram users could pay to search the database. The intruders allegedly took advantage of a flaw that Facebook corrected in August 2019 and included information prior to that correction. You might not have any issues if you are a newcomer or have changed key details since the patch, but the breach still leaves many people vulnerable.
We asked Facebook for a comment.
As Gal noted, there’s only a lot that Facebook can do when the data is already in circulation and the associated flaw is no longer an issue. The social network could, however, notify affected users and the company is under pressure to alert affected users so that they can monitor possible spam calls and fraud.