Facebook: data from 500 million accounts uploaded

Data on more than 500 million Facebook users from a leak in 2019, including email addresses and phone numbers, was posted 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," tweeted this Saturday morning, Alon Gal, technical director of the anti-cybercrime agency Hudson Rock, criticizing the "absolute negligence" of Facebook.

All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free.

This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked.

I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data.

https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8

- Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021

Business Insider says it was able to verify that some leaked phone numbers still belonged to the owners of the affected Facebook accounts.

Numbers, names, accounts, dates of birth

"This is old data" the leak of which "had already been reported in the media in 2019. We found and repaired this problem in August 2019", reacted to AFP a spokesperson for Facebook.

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.

Data includes phone number, full name, date of birth and, for some accounts, email address, according to Business Insider.

Malicious people "will certainly use this information for scams, hacking and marketing", noted the expert in cybercrime.

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.