04/16/2021
Facebook is garnering headlines for another data leak putting users' privacy at risk. The latest incident involves the personal information of 533 million Facebook users from 106 different countries as apparently discovered by Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock.
In an April 3 tweet, Gal said the data, which includes Facebook members' account creation date, bio, birthdate, Facebook IT, full name, location, past location and relationship status, has been made available free to members of a hacking forum.
In a January 14 post, he said an early 2020 vulnerability which exposed the phone numbers linked to every Facebook account had been exploited and that a hacker had advertised a paid bot that would allow users to query the database. Facebook claims the data must have been scraped prior to September 2019, before the vulnerability was addressed.