Breaking News. Over 533 Million Facebook User's Phone Numbers and Personal Data Leaked Online.

In what's likely to be a goldmine for bad actors, personal information associated with approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide has been leaked on a popular cybercrime forum for free—which was harvested by hackers in 2019 using a Facebook vulnerability.

The leaked data includes full names, Facebook IDs, mobile numbers, locations, email addresses, gender, occupation, city, country, marital status broken, account creation date, and other profile details down by country, with over 32 million records belonging to users in the U.S., 11 million users the U.K., and six million users in India, among others.

In total, the data being offered includes user information from 106 countries. Additionally, the data seems to have been obtained by exploiting a vulnerability that enabled automated scripts to scrape Facebook users' public profiles and associated private phone numbers en masse. The flaw has since been fixed by Facebook.

"This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019," said Liz Bourgeois, Facebook's director of strategic response communications, in a Saturday tweet.

Old data or not, the fact that the data appears to have been obtained by scraping Facebook profiles further complicates the company's equation with privacy, even as it has emerged relatively unscathed in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, in which the British consulting firm amassed of the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent for purposes of political advertising.

While this data dump appears to have sold in cybercrime communities at least since last year, a Telegram bot that appeared on the scene earlier this January allowed users to look up a phone number and receive the corresponding user's Facebook ID, or vice versa for a fee.

But with the data now available publicly for free, it's likely that the leak will allow malicious adversaries to exploit information for social engineering, marketing scams, and other cybercrimes. Users who have shared their phone numbers and email addresses with Facebook and have not changed them since 2019 are advised to watch out for possible smishing attacks, spam calls, and fraud.

Comments

UGANDA ELECTORAL COMMISSION TO ELIMINATE NATIONAL IDENTIFICATION CARDS (IDs) FOR 2021 GENERAL ELECTIONS.

The elimination of using National IDs (Ndagamuntu) for the 2021 elections should not have come as a surprise. One would be very NAIVE to think that Bobi Wine has not prepared for this in his Business Plan under the RISK section. It is public knowledge that our EC is not independent. It is also public knowledge that Military Dictator Yoweri Museveni will never lose an election. What stunned us this morning is when we noticed that on social media, people were mocking Bobi with his "get your Ndagamuntu". We are on record for saying to all Our readers that the National ID is like Apartheid in South Africa. Students of History would know how those IDs were being used to arrest people, deny them jobs, deny them basic services. Consequently, Bobi was not wrong and will never be wrong on the Ndagamuntu. Except the ones attacking him and mocking him forget that in Uganda, now, no National ID (Ndagamuntu), no service. If you have not been denied registering your child i...

President Museveni Praises Soldiers for Torturing Bobi Wine in Arua on August 2018.

President Museveni at the passout of police officers in Masindi Friday https://www.facebook.com/1829407613953796 President Museveni has praised his Special Forces Command [SFC] guards for properly and legally beating National Unity Platform [NUP] presidential flagbearer, Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine. “The other day, there was a fracas in West Nile where our young friend Bobi Wine was fighting security people,” Museveni said Friday while passing out police recruits at Kabalye Training School in Masindi district. “I think they beat him a bit and then they came and said a Member of Parliament has been beaten. I said let me study and see how he was beaten. I found the man had been beaten in the right way,” Museveni explained. “This was because…I think this was SFC people who are not police-minded. They are used to doing other things. But somehow they managed to act properly, I was surprised.” When they [SFC] went where this young man was in the room, he had ca...

Here is Why Our Utterances For Praying Jesus And God To Come Liberate Ugandans, May Be Misplaced. This Phrase is like inform of a Letter To Some Categorized Section Of Ugandans.

https://m.facebook.com/yusufosuta/photos/a.1896701010557789/2070383359856219/?type=3 OPEN LETTER TO NRM SUPPORTERS - NATIONAL ROBBERS MOVEMENT. .................................................................................. Last week of March, a friend told me to pray for Uganda. I told him that he was an Idiot and we have prayed for too long and we are still hungry and sick and Jesus is not coming soon to liberate us. He then ignored the STUPID and sent me a picture we all now know. It got me totally messed up. This guy was telling me to pray then sends a picture of men bowing down in blood. He might have meant guns but I blocked him because his utterances of praying for Uganda were misplaced. I unblocked him 3 weeks later and asked him about praying and assassinations. His reply "eithrr prayers or guns or both". I hate violence with a passion. So he is now blocked in like FOREVER. Do you feel safe? Do not feel safe. Uganda regim...

Osuta Yusuf

Search This Blog