Facebook accounts of 533 Million Users Leaked
According to security researcher Alon Gal, personal data from 533 million Facebook accounts has been leaked online for free. Several of the leaked documents were verified by Insider.
According to Insider, “the exposed data contains personal details of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries,” including “over 32 million records on users in the United States, 11 million records on users in the United Kingdom, and 6 million records on users in India.” “It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, addresses, birthdates, profiles, and — in some cases — email addresses,” according to the study.
If the 533 million figure sounds familiar, it’s because it’s from the same dataset that people might pay for using a Telegram bot, as Motherboard recorded in January. However, it now seems that those who want access to the data will not have to pay anything.
Data Leak from Flaw of 2019
According to Facebook, the data was scrapped as a result of a flaw that was patched in 2019. In January, the company gave Motherboard a similar response. Facebook told BleepingComputer, “This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019.” “In August of this year, we discovered and resolved this issue.”
“I haven’t seen anything yet to say this breach isn’t legit,” Troy Hunt, the founder of the Have I Been Pwned website, said on Saturday. He found only around 2.5 million unique email addresses in the data (which is still a lot! ), but “the phone numbers have the biggest effect here.” In Hunt’s terms, here’s what that might mean:
I highly advise you to read Hunt’s entire Twitter thread about the violation if you have the time.
Have I Been Pwned has already been updated with the leaked email addresses, so you can see if yours was included in the dataset. He’s also debating whether or not to make the leaked phone numbers publicly accessible via the service.
Mark Zuckerberg Uses Signal
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, uses the Signal application. Zuckerberg’s phone number was among the 533 million Facebook users’ data that was leaked. According to an online article, his name, location, marriage information, birth date, and Facebook user ID were also leaked, in addition to his phone number.
By posting his leaked phone number, a security researcher revealed that Zuckerberg uses Signal, confirming the Facebook CEO’s use of the tool. “In another turn of events, Mark Zuckerberg respects his own privacy by using a chat app that isn’t owned by Facebook and has end-to-end encryption. This is the number associated with his account from the recent Facebook leak,” security expert Dave Walker wrote on Twitter, accompanied by a screenshot of Zuckerberg’s leaked phone number that read, “Mark Zuckerberg is on Signal.”
The news comes at a time when many users are migrating to Signal, which appears to be a safer alternative to Facebook-owned WhatsApp’s current privacy policy. The controversial new terms of service for WhatsApp are set to take effect in May 2021. Facebook’s revised privacy policy alters how it accesses users’ chats with business accounts.