500 Million+ Facebook User’s Phone Number and Personal Data Leaked

Facebook is under some serious trouble as reports claiming that personal data and phone number of more than 500 million users has surfaced. This piece of information came to light on a low-level hacking forum.

According to the report, the leaked data contains personal information and the phone numbers of around 533 million Facebook users. These users belong to 106 countries from which there are 32 million American users, 11 million British users and 6 million Indian users and so on. In addition to phone numbers, the leaked data contains  Facebook IDs, full names, location, birth dates, bios, and even email addresses in several samples.

According to a spokesperson from the company, the leaked data has was scrapped due to a vulnerability that was patched back in 2019. However, this data if came to the possession of scammers could be used for fraudulent activities and even loot money off of millions of users. Alon Gal, the CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock said that “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.”

We advise the users to stay alert and refrain from handing over sensitive data to strangers online and inform the authorities about any suspicious activities or incident that concern your online accounts at the earliest.