Personal data of 1.5 billion Facebook users being sold online
- The data includes names, locations, email address, phone numbers and more.
- This is the biggest dump of Facebook user data to date and follows an unrelated outage and earlier data dump.
The personal data of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a hacking-based forum (via Privacy Affairs).
The news follows a global outage of all Facebook platforms, and is likely unrelated. The data has reportedly been leaked through scraping, where data that is publicly available is organised into databases. Although no accounts have been hacked, it will concern users that their data has been shared online for scammers and marketers to take advantage of.
According to a forum member, the data includes names, email addresses, locations, genders, phone numbers and user IDs. The leaked data isn’t thought to have been shared publicly before in a previous Facebook data breach.
The data could be used by hackers and scammers to build up profiles of people, and could also result in an increase in phishing scams through SMS or email. Facebook hasn’t yet commented on the data dump.
Facebook users should check their account privacy settings and ensure their accounts are set to private, not public. Apple Scoop will publish a full article explaining the best privacy settings to change on Facebook soon.
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