The personal data of more than half a billion Facebook users reemerged online Saturday.
The leak includes personal information on all 533 million users, including: full names, phone numbers, addresses, birth dates, Facebook IDs, bios, and in some cases email addresses, Business Insider reported.
Facebook says the data breach was not a hack, but it was posted to a low-level hacking forum, BI reported.
A Facebook blog provided an explanation as to why the breach pf privacy was not disclosed.
Facebook said the data had scraped off the platform at some point before September 2019.
“Scraping is a common tactic that often relies on automated software to lift public information from the Internet that can end up being distributed in online forums like this,” Mike Clark product-management director for Facebook wrote.
Clark’s blog goes on to claim, whoever obtained the data, exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s contact importer, which uses a person’s phone number to find them on Facebook.
Clark added, since this issue was originally discovered and reported in August 2019, the company was not required to notify its users.
Source: Newmax
