Security researcher Bob Diachenko has discovered an open database with Facebook IDs, names and phone numbers of 267 million Facebook users. This is reported by the "Comparitech" tech portal, which made the discovery known together with the researcher. The database therefore primarily contains information on users from the USA.
Bob Diachenko suspects that the database was probably put together by Vietnamese criminals. Last week, the data was also offered for download in a hacker forum.
It is still unclear how the criminals got the Facebook data. They may have been tapped through Facebook's developer interface. According to the security researcher, a security vulnerability is also an option - but the criminals may also have simply accessed public data from profiles in an automated manner using software.
Facebook is checking the leak
For a long time, users could be found on Facebook by entering a phone number. The function was switched off last spring after Facebook admitted that it had been misused to access data.
Facebook announced on Thursday that the company is investigating the possible leak. "However, we believe that this is information that was obtained before we improved data protection in the past few years," said a Facebook spokesman for the AFP news agency. According to "Comparitech", the database was no longer accessible on Thursday.
Facebook is constantly shaken by data protection scandals. Most recently, a security researcher found a database on the Internet in September that contained phone numbers of more than 419 million users of the social network. There were also other problems: In January 2019, during a routine check, the company noticed that millions of passwords had been stored unencrypted and thus visible for Facebook employees.
