Facebook: Data of hundreds of millions of users rediscovered online

Status: 07:51 am.| Reading time: 2 minutes

D.Phone numbers, email addresses and other data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users were rediscovered in a hacker forum over the weekend. Published user data includes full usernames, dates of birth, and sometimes relationship status.

“This is old data, it was reported back in 2019. We found and fixed the problem in August 2019,” a spokesman for the online network wrote on Twitter on Saturday (local time).

IT security firm Hudson Rock previously found data from 533 million Facebook users on the Internet, such as the news site “Business Insider” Announced. The report said some data is still current.

Alon Call, the technology head of Hudson Rock, a company that compiles information on cybercrime, threw it out Facebook Prior to this “absolute indifference”. “This means that if you have a Facebook account, the phone number you used for the account is likely to have been leaked,” Call said. “Bad actors will definitely use information for social engineering, fraud, hacking and marketing.”

Facebook has 2.8 billion active users

When personal information such as email addresses and phone numbers are in circulation, the risk of people falling for fake emails increases because they are more reliable. According to the latest information, 2.8 billion users are active on Facebook at least once a month.

In early 2019, the phone numbers of 420 million users appeared on the Internet after a friend misused the search function to access data. Phone numbers are not obvious, but can be called on a large scale using automated inquiries – so-called “scraping”. This violates Facebook rules, but is technically possible until the online network finally shuts down functionality. Once such data is tapped, it cannot be prevented from spreading on the Internet.

Scraping has always been an issue for Facebook. In 2018, the online network had to acknowledge that all data that could be accessed publicly from more than two billion users had been systematically collected through automatic recovery.

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Then there were the data security discussions about Clearview AI, which collected publicly viewed images from Facebook’s photo site Instagram, based on which it compiled a database for facial recognition. Clearview AI clients include US law enforcement agencies.