Failbook: Personal data of roughly 530 million accounts from 106 countries leaks online
Back in 2019, Facebook suffered a major data breach that exposed personal data of more than 500 million users to unknown malicious parties. As it often happens in such cases, the leaked data was not unleashed into the wild back then and it probably circulated in very select circles. However, everything changed this Saturday.
According to Business Insider, "A user in a low level hacking forum on Saturday published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online." The same source reveals the impressive numbers below:
- Total Facebook accounts compromised: 533 million.
- US Facebook accounts compromised: 32 million.
- UK Facebook accounts compromised: 11 million.
- India Facebook accounts compromised: 6 million.
Obviously, at least some of the users that had their accounts compromised back in 2019 changed their passwords ever since. However, their email addresses can now be added to various lists and be targeted by spam, scam and phishing attempts, not to mention the multiple ways of using real names, locations, and birthdays for malicious purposes.
In the end, there should be no real danger for Facebook users in this moment, but everyone must be careful and change their passwords from time to time. As a must-do measure, enabling two-factor authentication for any accounts (Facebook or anywhere else) that one has could spare them from a lot of trouble.
Source(s)
Alon Gal (on Twitter)
