Another data breach by Facebook

In a hacking forum held this Saturday, April 3, a database with personal information of more than 533 million Facebook users from about 100 countries that use the platform was released, among which are the United States, Mexico, Spain and Brazil. Among the data that have been made public from the users’ accounts are full names, telephone numbers, dates of birth, among other important personal data, for which we come to analyze this data breach by Facebook.

When you open an account on a social network such as Facebook, you accept all its terms and conditions, and at the same time you are transferring much of your personal data so that it can be used by the company itself or even by its partners for different issues, but also These personal data run the risk that, due to some oversight or bad practice, they reach the reach of cybercriminals, as has happened now and that unfortunately is not the only time that has happened.

What happened in this Facebook data breach

It is paradoxical that Facebook has not learned anything in recent years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other personal data leaks that have taken place, and now the security breach reaches 533 million accounts on the social network. It was all discovered late on Saturday, when a user of a low-profile hacking forum posted phone numbers and personal details of millions and millions of Facebook users, which are now visible to onlookers on the dark web.

Business Insider has reviewed a sample of this leaked data by verifying various records by matching phone numbers of Facebook users against the identifications listed in the dataset. They have also managed to verify email address records in Facebook’s password reset feature. All of this leaked data could make it easier for cybercriminals in the future to use social engineering practices to gain access to much more sensitive data such as banking.

Since January there were already clues of this data leak, since Alon Gal discovered in that same hacking forum the sale of an automated bot that could provide the telephone number of hundreds of millions of Facebook users. It is not the first time that Facebook has faced a security issue of this magnitude, given that in 2019 a vulnerability was discovered that allowed the phone number of millions of people to be extracted from Facebook’s servers, violating its terms of service But the problem here is that this is not new and has happened before.

Also check:
The Biggest Leaks of Data Known Today So Far
Data Breach of Razer and what happened

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