Facebook does not have a great reputation when it comes to protecting the privacy of its users, and the latest reports are certainly not helping their case. According to security researcher Alon Gal, it looks like the personal data of over 500 million Facebook users has made its way online.
This includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, location, birthdays, bios, home addresses, and more info. Insider has now verified that this data is accurate, at least based on the sample that they got when they checked for themselves. Facebook has also verified this and says that this information was actually scraped from a vulnerability that they patched back in 2019, suggesting that it isn’t a new issue.
Speaking to Insider, Gal said, “A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts.”
But what can you do about it? Not much. The best thing right now is to be more careful about posting your personal information online, and also to keep an eye out on your credit cards and emails to make sure that the leaked information isn’t being used to impersonate you online or in real life somehow. We should always be cautious.
Source Ubergizmo
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