The personal data of its 533 million users Facebook leaked to the Internet on Saturday, March 3, proving once again the company’s inability to protect the amount of information it collects.
Between data leaked include the names and nicknames of Facebook users, phone numbers, dates of birth and email addresses, according to an article by Business Insider.
“This is old data that was reported in the past, in 2019,” said a Facebook spokesman. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybersecurity company Hudson Rock and one of the first to detect the leak last Saturday, said such a large database could lead to the exploitation of the data by malicious individuals in an attempt to obtain it. control of various accounts.
“Databases, especially large or sparse ones, are not shared immediately because the people who maintain them try to make as much money as they can,” Gall wrote on Twitter. “The process sometimes takes years, sometimes days, but eventually all private databases are leaked after they are first sold.”
Data leaks threaten to undermine Facebook’s business model for collecting large volumes of personal data and using them to sell targeted ads.
The leaked data is available for free on one forum hacker, Mrmaking it accessible to anyone with basic skills, writes Business Insider.
According to the article, the leaked data concerns 32 million users in the US, 11 million users in the United Kingdom and 6 million users in India, but also user data from many other countries.
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