Facebook users have to worry about the use of the platform, as more than 500 million phone numbers, and other personal details of users have been leaked on an online forum.
The data leaked includes phone numbers, full names, location of users, email addresses, and other information. The data leaked can be used by hackers to impersonate people and commit fraud.
The leaked data was published by a user in a low-level hacking forum. The information was published for free.
The information includes users’ data from 106 countries, it also includes 32 million records on people in the United States of America, 11 million users in the United Kingdom, and 6 million people in India.
Business Insider revealed the leaked information and verified some of the records by matching them with known Facebook users’ phone numbers, and IDs listed in the data set. The team also verified records by testing email addresses from the data set in Facebook’s password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user’s phone number.
Cybercriminals could use the information to impersonate the owners or scare them into handing over the login details of the users.
The forum user who posted the leaked data advertised an automated bot that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users in exchange for money. The bot’s existence has been verified by reliable sources.
This is not the first time that a huge number of Facebook users’ phone numbers have been found exposed on the internet. In 2019, a vulnerability allowed millions of people’s phone numbers to be scrapped from Facebook’s servers in violation of its terms of service. That has since been patched.
Another huge problem arose after Cambridge Analytica scraped the data of 80 million users in violation of Facebook’s terms of service, targeting voters with political ads in the 2016 election.
