Over 267 million active Facebook users’ information is leaked. The Comparitech’s report came forward by a cybersecurity researcher known as Bob Diachenko. Information like contact numbers, name and address of the aforementioned accounts has been allegedly exposed. Bob Diachenko believed that the data collection is an abuse of Facebook API by the criminals living in Vietnam. The data has been “scraped” by hackers from different Facebook public pages and added one by one into the database. According to Comparitech the term “Scrapping” depicts a process in which the bots scroll through a massive number of websites collect and copy the user’s information.
As per the same report around 267,140, 436 users were residents of the United States of America. So either user whose data is exposed will be targeted to scam attempts, spammed text messages, or phishing campaigns. The data was exposed luckily for only ten days on the dark web before it was reported by Diachenko.
A spokesperson for Facebook said in an interview: “We are looking into this issue, but believe this is likely information obtained before changes we made in the past few years to better protect people’s information.”
For now, Facebook wants all the users to adjust the privacy setting to “friends” and Facebook id linking to other search engines from “yes” to “no”. This is however not the first time Facebook breached the privacy of its users. Back in September, another data and security researcher quoted a similar database breach that contained over 419 million data linked to 50 million Facebook users. The hacking group spammed the “view as” feature of Facebook as it was vulnerable to exploitation. The data has been leaked and exposed multiple times. In April of 2018, the company exploited the data of over 87 million users to the Cambridge Analytica. It was very serious in fact, Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to appear before the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committee and House Committee on Energy and Commerce because of this data mishandling.
