Science & Technology
Data of 500 million Facebook users may be leaked
The private information of more than 500 million Facebook users may have been compromised, and an unidentified leaker says they are offering the data for sale for virtually nothing, Reuters reported.
Alon Gal, the co-founder of an Israeli cybersecurity firm called Hudson Rock, says that the information appears to be the same set of Facebook-linked telephone numbers that has been circulating in hacker circles since January.
It’s being sold for a few dollars’ worth of digital credit on a well-known site for low-level hackers.
Reuters hasn’t been able to verify the information, but Gal and some journalists who have seen the data dump say they have been able to match phone numbers of people they know. He warns that Facebook users should be on the lookout for possible “social engineering attacks” in the coming months.
In a statement, Facebook said that the data was “very old” and related to an issue that it had fixed in August 2019.