Facebook: Data from 500 million accounts uploaded (Illustration) – Pixabay
There are full names, phone numbers, dates of birth and, in some cases, email addresses … Data on over 500 million Facebook users from a leak in 2019 has been released. online on a hacker forum, the site reported on Saturday
Business Insider, confirming information from a cybercrime expert.
“The archives concerning 533 million Facebook accounts have just been disclosed for free”, Alon Gal tweeted on Saturday morning, technical director of the anti-cybercrime agency Hudson Rock, criticizing the “absolute negligence” of Facebook.
Around 20 million French accounts
“This is old data” whose leak “had already been reported in the media in 2019. We found and repaired this problem in August 2019,” responded a spokesperson for Facebook. Business Insider claims, however, that it was able to verify that some leaked phone numbers still belonged to the owners of the affected Facebook accounts.
Nearly 20 million French accounts and 32 million US accounts, among others, could be affected, Alon Gal said on Twitter in January, when a user was still looking to sell the data on the same forum.
This is not the first time that data from millions of users of the first social network – which has nearly 2.8 billion monthly users – has been put online. Revealed in 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a British firm that hijacked the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users for political propaganda purposes, had permanently tarnished the reputation of the social network on the issue of data privacy.