The personal data of hundreds of millions of users of the social network Facebook has been made public by the user of a hacking forum, Business Insider reported on Saturday.
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This data leak concerns more than 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries and includes the disclosure of their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, email addresses, but also places, dates of birth and biographies displayed. on their profiles.
A Facebook spokesperson then explained to the American website that “the data had been deleted due to a vulnerability corrected by the company in 2019”.
But while the data is several years old, it can still provide valuable information to cybercriminals, warned Alon Gal, technical director of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, in an interview with Business Insider.
“A database of this size, containing private information such as the phone numbers of many Facebook users, could lead malicious people to take advantage of this data to carry out social engineering attacks.” [ou] hacking attempts, ”said Mr. Gal.
The data in question would have been revealed for the first time last January on the same hacking forum, discovered the technical director of Hudson Rock.
The information could then be provided in exchange for a certain price, which is no longer the case now that it has been published for free on the platform.
“People who sign up with a reputable business like Facebook trust them with their data and Facebook [est] supposed to treat data with the utmost respect, ”said Gal.
This is not the first time that so much personal data of Facebook users has been discovered online, we think in particular of the revelations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. The social network created by Mark Zuckerberg then promised to crack down on these information use practices.