On Saturday, over 500 million personal profile information of Facebook users was published online in a low level hacking forum. The information leaked included the Facebook users ID, full name, phone number, birthday, bio, location and in some cases their email addresses.

The number of profiles leaked exceeds 533 million from 106 countries. There were over 32 million accounts from the United States, 11 million accounts from the UK, and 6 million from India.

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The leaked data could potentially be utilized by cybercriminals to scam the individual or get them to hand over login credentials.

“A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks or hacking attempts,” – Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock

According to a Facebook spokesperson the leak occurred due to a vulnerability the company had patched up from 2019.

This is not the first time Facebook data has been hacked. During the 2016 election Cambridge Analytica got the data of 80 million users to target them for political ads.

Facebook has not said how they will resolve the issue, they are too busy fact checking real news.

This piece was written by Zach Heilman on April 3, 2021. It originally appeared in RedVoiceMedia.com and is used by permission.

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