For Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the data leak is closer to home than expected. His phone number and other details have been leaked in the recent set of the data leak, alleged a security researcher.
A cybersecurity researcher Dave Walker claimed that this data leak also includes the contact detail of Zuckerberg. His data is among the 32 million users (3.2 crore) in the United States whose data is leaked.
According to Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO at Hudson Rock, data of over 553 million (53 crore) Facebook users were available in a hacking forum since January. It was found that the hacker made available data that included details like phone numbers and other personal data for free. This data breach includes details of users from around 106 countries, including India. It is reported that data of 11 million users in the United Kingdom and six million users in India is found in this set of data leak.
Gal stated on the microblogging site, “In early 2020, a vulnerability that enabled seeing the phone number linked to every Facebook account was exploited, creating a database containing the information of 533 million users across all countries.”
He went on to add that it was severely under-reported and today the database became much more worrisome.
The company claimed that this data leak was due to vulnerability in 2019 which was rectified then and this is old data.
In December 2019, data such as Facebook user IDs, phone numbers and names were leaked of around 267 million users. It was believed that the data was harvested by cybercriminals. Meanwhile, before this, there was a huge revelation in 2018. It was revealed that British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected the personal data of millions of Facebook users. After this allegation was found true, the company was fined $5 billion by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for data privacy violations.
