Data for 500 Million Facebook Users Found Online

Data for some 500 million Facebook users has been found online, in the latest incident involving the social media giant.

The data, involving 533 million Facebook users, was published online Saturday. Alon Gal, cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock’s CTO, was the first to discover the data had been leaked.

https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/1378314424239460352?s=20

According to Gal, the data includes full name, birthdate, phone number, Facebook ID, location, past location, bio, relationship status, account creation date and, in some cases, email address.

The data includes users in over 100 countries, including the data of more than 32 million US users.

https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/1378724412334219265?s=20

According to Business Insider, the first to report the story, Facebook says the information was gathered as a result of a vulnerability that allowed data to be scraped. The company says the issue was fixed in 2019, making this ‘old data.’ Nonetheless, the fact that it includes so much personal information makes it just as dangerous now as when it was scraped.

Facebook is already under increased government scrutiny, and this is sure to bring even more.