Data on more than 500 million Facebook users from a 2019 leak, including email addresses and phone numbers, were posted on a hacker forum, this was reported Saturday, confirming information from cyber crime experts.
“The records of 533 million Facebook accounts have just been disclosed for free,” tweeted Alon Gal, technical director of the Hudson Rock cybercrime agency Saturday morning, criticizing Facebook’s “utter negligence.”
Costa Rican’s accounts
In the case of Costa Rica, the data breach would have affected 1,464,002 accounts, whose personal information is now available on the internet, according to Alon Gal, director of technology at the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, on Twitter.
Experts say it was able to verify that some leaked phone numbers still belonged to the owners of the affected Facebook accounts. This data includes phone number, full name, date of birth and, for some accounts, email address. Malicious people “will surely use this information for scams, hacking and marketing,” said the cybercrime expert.
Not the first time
This is not the first time that data from millions of users of the world’s leading social network, which has almost 2.8 billion monthly users, has been put online. Revealed in 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a British firm that captured the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users for political propaganda purposes, had tarnished the social network’s reputation on data privacy.
