Sunday April 4th 2021
Data theft from 2019
Facebook data appears in hacker forum
A nightmare: Millions of personal data from Facebook users appear in a hacker forum. Although the data leak became known as early as 2019, the personal information is now made relatively easily accessible again. Facebook wants to play down the incident.
Telephone numbers, email addresses and other data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users were discovered again in a hacker forum over the weekend. “These are old data that was already reported in 2019. We discovered and fixed the problem in August 2019,” wrote a spokeswoman for the online network on Twitter on Saturday. The IT security company Hudson Rock had previously discovered data from 533 million Facebook users on the Internet, as reported by the “Business Insider” page.
When personal information such as email addresses and phone numbers circulate, people are more likely to fall for fake emails because they can be made more authentic. According to the latest information, Facebook has 2.8 billion users who are active at least once a month.
Spread can hardly be stopped
As early as 2019, the phone numbers of 420 million users appeared online after a friend search function was misused to access data. The telephone numbers were not openly visible, but could be called up on a large scale via automated inquiries – so-called “scraping”. This violated the Facebook rules, but was technically possible until the online network finally switched off the function. Once such data has been tapped, it can hardly be stopped from spreading on the internet.
Scraping has always been a problem for Facebook. In 2018, for example, the online network had to admit that all publicly accessible data from the then more than two billion users was systematically collected through automatic retrieval. Later there were data protection debates about the company Clearview AI, which collected publicly visible images from, among other things, Facebook’s photo platform Instagram and on this basis put together a database for facial recognition. Clearview AI customers include US law enforcement agencies.
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