Facebook, the owner of the most famous social networking site in the world, is still subject to piracy, with the emergence of many gaps and errors, despite extensive efforts to uncover and solve them as soon as possible. This time, we are facing a very interesting and dangerous event. More than 533 Facebook users have leaked data over the past hours.
The leak includes personal data such as phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, geographical location, date of birth, and CV, and in some cases it also reached e-mail addresses. Although it is not very dangerous for ordinary users, it is different for celebrities, business owners, and businesses.
According to Facebook, the data is said to be old as it was discovered and reported in 2019, and it was repaired in the same year. At the time, the company addressed a technical flaw that allowed information to be leaked. However, once this data spreads from the Facebook network, the company has limited ability to limit its spread online.
According to an intelligence official, databases, especially if they are important or scarce, are not widely shared immediately because the people who find them will consider monetizing them for as long as possible above all. The process sometimes takes years or days, and in the end all the private databases are sold out in the dark internet.
In early 2020, a serious vulnerability was exploited that allowed seeing the phone number associated with each Facebook account, which led to the creation of a database containing information of 533 million users from different countries of the world.
Little detail was given in the reports, and today the database is much more interesting in terms of numbers. Data leaks threaten Facebook's business model of collecting a large amount of personal information and using it to sell targeted ads.
Finally, according to the sources, the data is currently available through many hacking forums, making it accessible to anyone with raw data skills. The records were verified by matching the phone numbers of leaked Facebook users of celebrities with the original data, and in another experiment the email addresses of the dataset were tested in the Facebook password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal the user's phone number and then match.
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