A computer security company denounces the leak of more than 500 million Facebook accounts – Explica .co

The firm specialized in cybercrimes Hudson Rock has denounced this Saturday the leak, by an alleged user of a hacking forum, of more than 530 million Facebook accounts with personal information and phone numbers of their users.

The leaked data, which affects users in more than 100 countries, includes information on some 32 million user records in the US, more than 10.8 million in Spain, eleven million users in the UK and six million users in India, with names, phone numbers, Facebook identifiers, dates of birth, biographies and, in some cases, email addresses.

The Business Indiser website has been able to review a sample of the leaked data and verified several records provided under the supervision of Hudson Rock’s chief technology officer and responsible for the discovery, Alon Gal.

“A database of that size containing private information, such as the phone numbers of many of Facebook’s users, would certainly lead to the bad actors take advantage of data to carry out social engineering attacks or hacking attemptsGal has explained.

The first leaks were detected in January when a user on the same hacking forum announced an automated program that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users in exchange for a price. The Motherboard website reported on the existence of that program at that time and verified that the data was legitimate.

Now, and according to Business Insider, the entire dataset has been posted to the hacking forum for free, making it widely available to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of data.

Facebook has confirmed this Saturday the leak but assures that it is the Reappearance on the Internet of the old personal data of more than 530 million accounts obtained illegally in 2019.

“This is old data, which was reported in 2019,” according to a company statement collected by Bloomberg. “We found and fixed this vulnerability in August of that year“, has added.