Stolen phone numbers and personal data of 533 million Facebook users, including Indians, leaked online

The stolen phone numbers and personal data of around 533 million Facebook users were leaked online for free on Saturday (April 3).

The leaked datainclude personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. The published data also include the phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and - in some cases - email addresses of several individuals.

Talking to Business Insider, a Facebook spokesperson said that the data was scraped due to a vulnerability in the social networking site which was patched in 2019.

Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, said that though the leaked datat could be a couple of years old but it is possible that the data could provide valuable information to cybercriminals who use people's personal information to cheat people. It is to be noted that Gal first discovered the entire trough of leaked data online on Saturday.

"A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook's users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts," Gal told Insider.