Data of 533 mn FB users, Including 6 mn Indians, leaked

In a major breach of privacy, a hacker has posted the phone numbers and sensitive account details of nearly 533 million Facebook users -- about a fifth of the social networking platform's entire user base -- including over 61 lakh Indian users. The data has been dumped on a public cybercrime forum. The leaked data includes Facebook ID numbers, profile names, email addresses, location information, gender details, job data, and other details.

"All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked," tweeted Alon Gal, CTO of security firm Hudson Rock.

"I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data," he added.

Facebook has confirmed the leak to The Record.

"This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019," a Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying in the report late on Saturday.

With the data now entering the public domain, there is a real danger that this information can be widely used by cybercriminals for email or SMS spam, robocalls, extortion attempts, threats and harassment, etc.

According to the database of the latest alleged leak, details of as many as 5.5 lakh users from Afghanistan, 1.2 million from Australia, 3.8 million from Bangladesh, 8 million from Brazil, and 6.1 million from India had been put up for free on several forums.

This is the second such instance within 10 days in India where claims of a user database of a company being leaked has resurfaced. Earlier this week on Tuesday, details of as many as 10 crore users of Gurgaon-based mobile payments and digital wallet company MobiKwik was allegedly leaked and was being sold on darkweb.