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People are silhouetted as they pose with laptops in front of a screen projected with a Facebook logo.
REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo
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Data Leak Exposes 533 million Facebook Users
The personal information of 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries was scraped and published for free on an online hacking forum on Saturday. The leak, which impacted over 32.3 million users in the United States, 11.5 million in the United Kingdom, and 6.1 million in India, included phone numbers, full names, birth dates, email addresses, locations, biographical data, and other sensitive information. On Wednesday, Facebook stated that the vulnerability which led to the leak was patched in 2019 and that the company does not plan on notifying any of its impacted users. Despite the age of the leak, experts warn that cybercriminals can still exploit the information. “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,” Alon Gal of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock told