Personal information, including phone numbers of Facebook users, on cybercriminals’ website
NEW YORK: Cyber security experts have revealed that personal information, including the phone numbers of millions of Facebook users in countries including India, has been hacked. Experts also say that hackers posted all of the personal information of half a million users on their website.
According to Alon Gal, CTO of cyber intelligence company Hudson Rock, there are records for more than 32 million accounts in the United States, 11 million in the United Kingdom, and 6 million in India. Some cases include full name, location, date of birth, email address, phone number, and contact status. Hudson Rock has released the phone numbers of two senior officials included in the database. The leak was first reported by the news website Insider.
“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” said Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone. But Facebook did not say whether it had notified affected users at the time.
Stone said the system for finding others using their phone number across Facebook and Instagram was removed in 2019. “A function that could be exploited using sophisticated software code, to imitate Facebook and provide a phone number to find which users it belongs to,” Stone explained.
Alon Gal of Hudson Rock pointed out that the way the data was sorted and posted on the hacking website this week made it much more accessible for criminals to manipulate. He mentioned that the data was from 2019, but that it would still be valuable to hackers and cyber criminals.
Rachel Tobac, an ethical hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security, said: “These are the pieces of data cyber criminals spend time searching for to perform social engineering attacks (a type of hacking) — but now they’re all in one place and easily accessible in this leak, which makes social engineering quicker and easier.”
Kindly click the link below to join WhatsApp group chat to get important news and breaking news from Irish Samachar
Comments are closed.