Facebook, through a spokesman, has said it is not confident that it has full visibility on which users need to be alerted regarding the those that were exposed during the 2019 breach.
Until now, the company has not notified the 530 million users whose details were exposed on a forum in 2024. Now, the company has put forward information that it really doesn’t have the plans to do so.
Phone numbers and other details from Facebook user profiles were available in a public database, as attested to by a popular technology news outlet. Facebook itself took to announce on a blog post earlier this week that malicious actors had obtained the data before September 2019 by ‘scraping’ profiles using a vulnerability in the platform’s tool for syncing contacts. The company said it patched the hole right after it discovered the breach.
While offering that Facebook will not notify affected users about the hack and that the company doesn’t even have the confidence that it had full visibility on which users were affected, the Facebook spokesperson said that users simply can’t fix the issue, and the hacked data is publicly available.
Good thing is that the hacked data did not include financial data, health information, or passwords, as Facebook said. However, people who know more about the collected data said it could provide valuable information for hacks or other abuses.
Much of the stolen data includes phone numbers and birth dates, and these are information that doesn’t change very often. It means that these details are still largely attached to active Facebook users.
According to Ivan Righi, cybercriminals can use information such as phone numbers, emails, and full names to launch targeted social engineering attacks because most users are still working from home due to the pandemic.
If Facebook continues to do as it said it would, that means it will disregard the agreement it had with authorities back in 2024 that it will report details about unauthorized access to data on 500 or more users within 30 days of confirming the incident.