More than 500 Million Facebook Users Personal Details on Sale
The information appears to be several years old, but it is another example of the vast amount of information collected by Facebook and other social media sites, and the limits to how secure that information is. The social media giant told media agencies that the leak was related to a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019
According to a Motherboard report, the bot exploited the Facebook vulnerability to access every Facebook account across all countries. The Telegram bot was selling a phone number or Facebook ID for $20 or INR 1,500, while batches of 10,000 numbers were being sold at $5,000 each.
The company also claimed the server contained about 220 Mn records. It remains to be seen whether the latest incident has any bearing on Facebook’s various court cases and privacy-related issues around the world.
Facebook was caught in another privacy and user data breach incident in January this year when phone numbers of nearly 6 Lakh Indian users were reported to be sold on Telegram through a bot
Past History of Facebook
Case 1:
In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher reported finding a database with the names, phone numbers and unique user IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users nearly all US-based on the open internet. It is unclear if the current data dump is related to this database.
Case 2:
The company is being probed for “illegally harvesting the personal data of Facebook users in India.” About 5.62 Lakh Indian users were allegedly affected by this data harvesting.
Case 3:
Personal data of 533 Mn Facebook users was leaked online on Saturday (April 3) on a hacker forum, according to news reports. The breach affected 6 Mn Indian users and includes details
Case 4:
As Cambridge Analytics still haunts nearly 87 million users, including over 5 lakh users from India, this has come as the biggest ever leak of a social media platform that has billions of users.
What personal details are hacked?
The availability of the data set was first reported by Business Insider. According to that publication, it has information from 106 countries including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, and email addresses.
Conclusion
According to a Facebook spokesperson, the bug was only accessible for a short period of time during a small test. The data is reportedly broken up into download packages by country. I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data.
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