Over 500 Million Facebook Users’ Personal Data Have Leaked Online

Facebook already has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to protecting the privacy of its users, and the latest reports are certainly not helping. According to security researcher Alon Gal, it appears that the personal data of over 500 million Facebook users have managed to make their way online.

This includes things like phone numbers, Facebook IDs, your full name, location, birthdays, bios, home addresses, and more. According to Insider, they have since verified that this data is accurate, at least based on the sample that they got and checked out for themselves. Facebook has also since verified this and claimed that this information was actually scraped from a vulnerability that they patched back in 2019, suggesting that it isn’t new.

However, at the same time, how often do we change our phone numbers, email, or home addresses anyway? Speaking to Insider, Gal said, “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.”

As to what users can do right now? Realistically speaking, there’s not much they can do. The best thing right now would probably be more careful about posting your personal information online, and also to keep an eye out on your credit cards and emails to make sure that the leaked information isn’t being used to impersonate you online or in real life.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook, Hack, Privacy, Security