Facebook Data Breach
If you have a Facebook account, you might want to check your account and change your password. On Saturday, the personal information of millions of Facebook users was leaked online by a low-level hacker.
The personal data included phone numbers, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and the email addresses of over 533 million Facebook users. Data from 106 countries was stolen, including more than 32 million users in the United States, 11 million in the UK, and 6 million users in India.
And if someone wanted to access the leaked data from the breach, they wouldn’t even need to buy it — the hacker posted the entire dataset on a hacking forum for free. Although the leaked data is a few years old, it can be used by cybercriminals who use people’s sensitive information to impersonate them or deceive them into handing over their login credentials.
A Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider that the data was stolen due to a vulnerability that the company fixed in 2019. The fixed vulnerability was a loophole that allowed millions of people’s phone numbers to be scraped from Facebook’s servers. In 2016, the infamous political data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica scraped the data of 80 million users, leading Facebook to promise to clamp down on data breaches.
According to a researcher, even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a victim of the data breach. His cell phone number was among the millions of leaked pieces of personal information.
To check if your email address was in the data breach, head over to haveibeenpwned.com.
I am not a financial advisor and my comments should never be taken as financial advice. Investments come with risk, so always do your research and analysis beforehand.
