If you have a Facebook account, you should probably take care of information and data protection in the near future.A new report states that a hacker posted private information online, including phone numbers, birthdays and locations, of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries.
According to Insider, the hacker was part of a low-level hacking forum and posted the information on Saturday.The information exposed seems to also include Facebook IDs, full names, biographies and in some cases, email addresses.The data accessed are assumed since 2019.Insider said the disclosure data included information on 32 million US users, 11 million UK users and 6 million users in India.
Insider also confirmed the accuracy of the data by entering the exposed e-mail addresses in the Facebook password reset, which shows a part of a user's phone number.The company told Insider that the data was deleted due to a vulnerability that was repaired in 2019.
The fact that the data seem to have been obtained by deletion is possible to affect a lot of Facebook, which has faced indignation due to incidents of this type of past.The best known was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the analysis company collected data on millions of users without their consent and used them to predict and influence users in the ballot box..
Liz Bourgeois, director of strategic response communications to Facebook, repeated this on Twitter on Saturday.
"These are old data that have been reported above in 2019.I found and remedied this problem in August 2019, ”she said.
While Facebook seemed to try to use the 2019 timer to minimize the impact of rumors, Insider explains that hackers can continue to damage with old data.Alon Gal, co -founder and CTO of the Israeli Company of Information about Cyber Crime Hudson Rock, told the press that a database of that dimension would lead to criminals to take advantage of data to carry out social engineering or pirate..
The cyber security expert said Facebook cannot do much to help users at the moment, because the data is already there, besides informing them and telling them to be looking for scams.