The personal data of 533 million Facebook users around the world were hacked and posted online in a dedicated forum. According to Business Insider, who reported it, the theft includes personal information on social network users in 106 countries: phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, places, dates of birth, biographies and in some cases email addresses. . “This is old data already reported in 2019,” said a Facebook spokesperson via email. At the time, the California-based company faced a bug in its technology that allowed data theft.
According to Alon Gal, chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, the data discovered today could be used to carry out illegal actions such as organizing online scams and contacting users via email or mobile phone to access additional personal information. Among the users affected, 32 million are in the US, 11 in Great Britain and six million in India.
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More generally, data leaks threaten to undermine Facebook’s business model which remains to collect a large amount of personal information and use it to sell super-profiled advertising.