Personal data including phone numbers, names, locations, email addresses, and biographical information of around 533 million Facebook users have been published online for free, by a user in a hacking forum. Experts warn that this data, which is now available for free, will increase instances of identity theft and impersonation for scamming.
The data is of users from 106 countries. Out of the total, 32 million records are of the users in the US, 11 million in the UK, and 6 million in India. A Facebook spokesperson said that the data was scraped due to a vulnerability that was discovered in 2019, but which was patched in August in the same year.
A similar data security breach case had been disclosed by Facebook in September 2018 which had affected 50 million users, this case later came to be known as the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. It was then said to be the largest breach in Facebook’s history which gave hackers the ability to take over accounts.
Report by Aashray
Graphics by Chetan
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