Facebook data on 533 million users dumped on hacking forum
The company says this is old data previously reported in 2019
Facebook data on 533 million users posted on hacking forum for free
In a major breach of privacy, personal details of over half a billion Facebook users have been leaked online on a hacking forum.
The exposed data reveals personal details of more than 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 44 million records on users in Egypt, 39 million in Tunisia, 32 million in the US and 11 million in the UK.
It includes their full names, phone numbers, gender, date of birth, location, relationship status and email address.
Story
Data of 533 million Facebook users leaked online, here is how you can check if you are safe
In a massive data breach, the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users was leaked online.
Ankita Chakravarti | April 6, 2021 | Updated 14:34 IST
Highlights
The data included the contact number, Facebook IDs, birthdates, and more of users.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other co-founders Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz were among the affected users.
In a massive data breach, the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users was leaked online.The data included the contact number, Facebook IDs, birthdates, and more of users. As per the Business Insider report, personal information of over 3.2 crore users in the US, 1.1 crores in the UK, and 60 lakh in India were exposed. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other co-founders Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz were among the affected users.
Alon Gal, chief technology officer of cyber crime intelligence company Hudson Rock, tweeted the news on Saturday after discovering the data posted for free on a forum. It followed a tweet he posted in January this year, warning that a vulnerability had allowed the database to be created in early 2020. The January tweet warned that the user had created a Telegram bot that would allow anyone to query the database for a low fee, allowing people to find phone numbers linked to many Facebook accounts.
The January tweet showed the data breach contained 32.3 million US Facebook accounts, representing just under 10% of the entire US population.
Over the long weekend reports emerged of an alleged data breach, impacting half a billion Facebook users from 106 countries.
And while this figure is staggering, there’s more to the story than 533 million sets of data. This breach once again highlights how many of the systems we use aren’t designed to adequately protect our information from cyber criminals.
Nor is it always straightforward to figure out whether your data have been compromised in a breach or not.
What happened?
More than 500 million Facebook users’ details were published online on an underground website used by cyber criminals.
It quickly became clear this was not a new data breach, but an older one which had come back to haunt Facebook and the millions of users whose data are now available to purchase online.
BBC News
Published
People can now enter their phone numbers into a website to see if they appeared in a recent Facebook data breach.
Details of more than 530 million people were leaked in a database online, largely consisting of mobile numbers.
People can use the Have I Been Pwned online tool to check if their numbers or emails were compromised.
Facebook says the data is from an “old” breach in 2019 but privacy watchdogs are now investigating.
The data
Facebook said it had found and fixed the breach more than a year-and-a-half ago.
But the information has now been published for free in a hacking forum, making it widely available.