The most famous social networking site, Facebook, again comes under the grey light on Saturday. The app leaked more than 500 million user data in a low-level hacking forum.
A recent development in this data breach came to light when a security researcher from Synack Red Team, Dave Walker. He revealed that Facebook’s CEO is a victim of the data breach.
Regarding the Facebook leak of the 533 million people, the irony is that Mark Zuckerberg is regrettably included in the leak as well, he addressed on Twitter.
Besides this, the researcher also told the public that Mark Zuckerberg also worries about his online privacy and uses the Signal app. Facebook’s CEO leaked phone number was end-to-end encrypted and didn’t belong to Facebook.
The leaked data includes private data of more than 533 million Facebook users. The users belong to 106 countries; over 32 million records were of US citizens. At the same time, 11 million data were of UK nationals and 6 million Indian users. The exposed data comprises users’ full names, bios, virtual locations, date of birth, Facebook IDs, and phone numbers.
The CTO of Hudson Rock, Alon Gal, discovered the leak. Alon Gal, in his tweet, said:
All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for that account leaked.
The data seems to be old, but it is another example of how Facebook collects vast user information and how essential it has become for the users to secure their data on social media sites.
The leaked dataset is familiar to the people because they could pay for portions of using a Telegram bot which Motherboard reported in January.
It was not the first event when Facebook leaked user data online. In 2019, a vulnerability exposed millions of people’s phone numbers from Facebook’s server. But this is not affecting Facebook’s popularity among the users. Facebook is the most used social media networking site. 2.79 billion users are actively using this site, and these numbers will increase in the future.
Moreover, Facebook had also cracked down on mass data-scraping after the famous Cambridge Analytica. The data breach leaked 80 million users’ data. It was a clear violation of Facebook’s terms of services to target voters with political ads back in the 2016 elections.
The exposed data can be a valuable asset to cyber-criminals. They can use the information to scam the users to get hold of their login credentials. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar and Republican John Kennedy called for the Facebook CEO to appear before Congress.
