Data of 533 million Facebook users leaked to the Network, of which 10 million – from Russia

A user of one of the hacker forums published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free. Freely redistributable database includes personal information of more than 533 million Facebook users. These include phone numbers, identifiers, full names, locations, dates of birth, bios, and sometimes email addresses. Previously, user numbers from this database were sold through a bot.

The database contains data from 106 countries, including 10 million records from Russia, 32 million from the US, 11 million from the UK, and 6 million from India. Business Insider verified the correctness of several verified entries by matching the phone numbers of well-known Facebook users with identifiers from the database. Reporters also verified that the email addresses used to reset Facebook’s password were correct – this functionality can also be used to partially reveal a user’s phone number.

The leak provides cybercriminals with valuable information that can be used to impersonate another person or fraudulently obtain user credentials. Leaked Technical Director on cybercrime Hudson Rock Company Alon Gal noted: “A database of this size containing personal information such as the phone numbers of many users Facebookwill certainly lead to the fact that attackers use this data to carry out attacks related to social engineering, or hacking attempts. “

Alon Gal first discovered the data breach in January, when a user on a hacking forum advertised an automated bot that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a price. The Motherboard resource reported the existence of this bot and confirmed that the data it gave out was true.

Now the entire dataset has been posted on the hacker forum for free, making it available to anyone with basic data skills. This is not the first time that a huge number of Facebook users’ phone numbers have been discovered on the web.