Experts say Facebook more than 500 million user data was leaked more than 670,000 users in China were affected

The social media platform Facebook has been hit with another breach of personal information of more than 500 million users. CNN Business, a CNN affiliate, reported Monday that cybersecurity experts said the personal information leaked included their phone numbers, names, addresses, birthdays and email addresses. The information was posted on an unnamed hacker website.

Alon Gal, co-founder and chief technology officer of Israeli cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock, said the breach involved a total of 533 million users in 106 countries, according to Pakistan’s Business Chronicle newspaper. The countries with the most affected users include more than 32 million accounts in the United States, 11 million in the United Kingdom and 6 million in India.

Gale was the first to report the breach via Twitter on Saturday (April 3). The leak came to light in connection with a discovery made by Gale in January of this year. On April 3, he discovered that an anonymous user on a “low-level hacking forum” had uploaded a database of users whose information matched that of previously stolen Facebook users.

Gale tweeted on Jan. 14, listing the number of affected users by country. There were 670,334 users in China, 734,807 in Taiwan, 2,937,841 in Hong Kong and 414,228 in Macau. Facebook was banned in China.

Hudson Rock showed CNN Business the phone numbers of two senior CNN staffers, which are included in the database.

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told CNN on Saturday, “This is old data that was previously reported in 2019. We found and resolved this issue in August 2019.”

Facebook did not say whether affected users were notified at the time, according to CNN Business.

Even if the leak involved old data from 2019, cyber experts note that they still have exploit value for hackers and cybercriminals.

This is not the first time Facebook user information has been found to have been compromised; in March 2018, U.S. and British media revealed that 50 million users’ information on Facebook had been leaked by a company called Cambridge Analytica. A few days later, Facebook founder and CEO Zuckerberg admitted responsibility for the data breach.