To all those who share their personal information haphazardly on various social media platforms, here’s a news piece that needs your immediate attention. Personal details of nearly half a billion (533 million) Facebook (FB) users was seen circulating on the dark web since Jan 2021 and the Mark Zuckerberg’s company seem to be unperturbed.
Reacting to the news, a Facebook spokesperson termed the leak as an old data breach that took place in August 2019 when some hackers accessed vital info from the servers of FB. And the spokesperson added that the company engineers later fixed the issue.
The highlight in this hack story is that personal details of the founder Mr. Zuckerberg were also found in the data trove including his date of birth, Facebook user ID, his marriage info, residence location and contact number.
Alon Gal, a co-founder of Israel-based Cyber Security Company Hudson Rock was the first to make this data leak public, and he added in his tweet that the information is for sale just for a cheap price of 17 Euros per 10,000 user account info.
Note- Leaked data also has info related to Chris Hughes the cofounder of FB and Dustin Moskovitz.
Marilyn Solomon who works as a freelance researcher for a London based cyber security firm says that the information dump might have leaked from the 2018 Cambridge Analytica Scandal related to Facebook where the congress prosecuted the FB founder for conducting a political survey just to collect the opinion of public favoring Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 Presidential elections.
Ireland’s Information Commissioner’s Office has taken a note of the data leak and is busy probing down the incident. And if Facebook is found breaching the GDPR rules, then it can face a heavy penalty and in some circumstances a ‘permanent’ ban across Europe.
