A cyber-attack has revealed the phone numbers, full names, and email addresses of an estimated 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries; including 4,200,000 million Libyans.
The data is believed to be more than a year old, but security experts say the information could still be used by criminals to commit identity fraud. That data included records on 32 million users in the United States, 11 million users in the United Kingdom, and six million users in India.
A spokesperson from Facebook told ‘Insider’ that the data was collected due to a vulnerability that the company had patched in 2019. On his part, Alon Gal; CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who first discovered the entire trough of leaked data online said, “A database of that size containing 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.
This is not the first time Facebook user data has been leaked on the web. In December 2019, 267 million Facebook User IDs, phone numbers, and names were left exposed, according to Ukrainian cyber threat researcher, Bob Diachenko.