Mobile Phone numbers linked to more than 400 million Facebook accounts were leaked online which includes 133 million belonging to those using FB in the US, 50 Million from Vietnam, 18 million from Britain and others from rest of the world.
According to a report published in TechCrunch, more than 1 million phone numbers belong to Celebrities from all over the world were available for purchase in the dark world.
Reacting to the news, Facebook agreed that the leaked data trove belonged to the firm but also reinstated that more than half of the info were mere duplicates.
As per a source reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders, hackers might have got the info through a phone number search feature which allowed FB users to find their near and dear ones on the platform. But after the Cambridge Analytica data scandal came into light in 2017, the feature was disabled from April’18.
Whatever might be the leak source, Facebook could face serious consequences in the UK for the latest data breach due to the new GDPR laws which kicked-in in May’18 across Britain.
For those who aren’t aware of the previous Facebook data scandal here’s a bit of knowledge share.
In the March 2017, FB and its CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg were accused of leaking personal viewpoints of US populace to a Britain based research firm named Cambridge Analytica regarding the possibility of presidential candidates winning the US 2016 polls.
Media speculations blew the data scandal out of proportion forcing Zuckerberg to testify before the Senate that the data share was indeed true and was carried out till 2015.
From the day the head of the world’s largest social networking site admitted to the fault, users of FB started to delete or deactivate their accounts due to lack of trust on the service provider and data privacy fears.
Now with the latest revelation of data breach related to FB phone numbers, things might further deteriorate for the social media giant shortly.
