Personal Information of Millions of Social Media Users Leaked Online

Personal information of 533 million Facebook users was posted for free in a hacking forum. The information includes data on users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on U.S. users, 11 million U.K. users, and 6 million users in India. Posted information includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses.

According to Facebook, the posted data was scraped due to a vulnerability that the company fixed in 2019.   According to experts, however, the data could still be valuable to cybercriminals who use personal information to impersonate individuals or scam them into handing over their login credentials.

Back in 2019, hackers posted millions of phone numbers scraped from Facebook’s servers as a result of the same vulnerability.  Now that the larger data set is available online for free, it could be widely accessible and misused by anyone with even rudimentary data skills.

The latest leak is one in the string of many privacy issues involving Facebook. Last year, it was revealed that thousands of developers were able to access data from inactive Facebook users.  Earlier, the company was involved in the Cambridge Analytica controversy, where Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to access personal information of users who took an online “personality quiz,” as well as personal information of their Facebook friends.

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