Facebook is once again in the spotlight when it comes to the leakage of personal data, as a report published this Saturday afternoon by Business Insider, reveals that leaked personal data of more than 500 million people has just been released. users from some 106 countries, including Spain, on an Internet pirate forum, now widely available for free.
Among the personal data are telephone numbers, user identifiers, dates of birth, full names, and even in some cases even email addresses, among others.
Those affected could become victims of phishing and scams
All these personal data now published are two years old, obtained before the company closed a security breach in August 2019. Despite this, according to a series of inquiries that the aforementioned publication has been able to carry out with a sample, these data they are still valid to this day.
For Alon Gal, director of technology at the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who was the one who discovered the publication of the leaked personal data in the aforementioned forum today, this data could allow bad actors to act against users affected by phishing or scams.
More specifically, it points out that:
A database of that size containing private information, such as phone numbers of many of Facebook’s users, would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to carry out social engineering attacks. [o] hacking attempts
Gal already had knowledge of the existence of the leaked data since this past January, when a user of the same hacking forum announced the existence of an automated bot capable of offering the phone numbers of millions of Facebook users, a bot that for Certainly it was also reported by Motherboard, also verifying the legitimacy of the data it offers.
At this point, Gal notes that Facebook can no longer do much to help affected users, as the leaked data is now visible to users with rudimentary knowledge to access.
In this sense, the only possibility that Facebook has is to notify affected users so that they can take action on the matter and take measures to avoid possible problems as a result of the use of their data.
