More than 500 million Facebook users’ personal information, including email addresses and phone numbers, originally leaked in 2019 has been posted on an online hacker forum for free use, according to media reports and cybercrime experts.
All 533 million Facebook records have been leaked for free use,” said Alon Gal, head of technology at Israeli cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, in a Twitter post today.
Gal denounced what he called Facebook’s “utter negligence.
According to Business Insider, some of the leaked personal information appears to be current information, but AFP could not independently confirm it. The newspaper said that some of the leaked phone numbers still belong to those who have Facebook accounts.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, it’s highly likely that the phone number used by that account has been leaked,” Garr said.
But Facebook said those reports were old news. A Facebook spokesperson told AFP: “This is old information that was previously reported in 2019. We resolved this issue in August 2019.”
Garr tweeted in January that the affected profiles covered 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including more than 32 million U.S. users, 20 million French users and 11 million British users, when the holders of those profiles tried to sell them.
That information included phone numbers, full names, birthdays and, in some cases, email addresses and relationship status.
Garr tweeted, “The bad guys are definitely using that information for social engineering, fraud, intrusion, and marketing.”
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