[Ammi]

The personal details of more than 500 million Facebook (FB) users, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates and email addresses, have reportedly been posted on a website for hackers.

According to Business Insider, which first reported the availability of the data, information of some 533 million people from 106 countries was online on Saturday.

This included 11 million records on users in the UK, more than 32 million on American users and 6 million on users in India.

It was first discovered by Alon Gal, the chief technology officer of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock.

Gal told the publication that a data dump of that magnitude would "certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts."

It is not the first time the social media company's data security issues have been brought into question.

In 2018, it disabled a feature that allowed users to search for people via phone numbers, after it was unveiled that Cambridge Analytica had accessed information on up to 87 million users without their knowledge or consent.

In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher discovered a database with the names, phone numbers and unique user IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users on the open internet. Nearly all of the information related to users based in the US.


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https://uk.yahoo.com/finance/news/da...132855293.html