Information of over 267 million Facebook Users Leaked

The information of over 267 million Facebook users is leaked. A cybersecurity researcher Bob Diachenko came up with the Comparitech’s report. Information including contact numbers, name and address has been exposed, as per claims.

According to Diachenko, the data collection is an abuse of the Facebook API by the criminals inhabiting in Vietnam. Data was “scraped” by hackers from various public pages of Facebook and added into the database one by one.

“Scrapping” has been termed by Comparitech as a process in which the bots scroll via a massive number of websites collect and copy the information of users.

Also read: Facebook bans millions of accounts for spreading misinformation

According to the report around 267,140, 436 users are residents of the United States of America. So users whose data is exposed might be targeted to scam attempts, spammed text messages, or phishing campaigns. The data was exposed for ten days on the dark web and then Diachenko reported it.

A Facebook spokesperson in an interview said,  “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.”

Facebook has asked all the users to change their privacy settings to “friends”. However, this is not the first time that Facebook has breached the privacy of its users. Earlier in September there was another data and security breach in which more than 419 million data linked to 50 million Facebook users was exposed. The “view as” feature of Facebook was spammed by the hacking group.

Facebook data has been leaked and exposed multiple times. Back in April, 2018 Facebook misused the data of 87 million users and gave it to Cambridge Analytica.