According to the TechCrunch publication, hundreds of millions of phone numbers linked to Facebook accounts have been exposed online, within several databases hosted on an unprotected server, which anyone could access.
The writing of TechCrunch, which had access to it, states that these databases contained among all more than 419 million records, of which 133 million corresponded to US users, more than 50 million to Vietnamese users and 18 million records to British users
Each record contained the unique ID of the user that identifies him within the social network, as well as the telephone number linked to the account. In some cases, the records contained other information such as username or gender.
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TechCrunch editors turned to Facebook’s password reset feature (which partially allows you to reveal the phone number) to verify the match between the accounts and the numbers displayed on the server. They located among the various numbers belonging to famous people that has not been revealed.
Bad times for privacy on Facebook
The presence of these telephone numbers reveals that the data was leaked more than a year ago, the time that the social network has restricted access to that particular data of its users’ profiles.
Jay Nancarrow, a Facebook spokesman, explained that, in any case, “we have not found evidence that Facebook accounts have been compromised”. However, leaking their phone numbers could have exposed their owners to various problems, such as spam calls and ‘SIM swapping’ attacks.
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Sanyam Jain, a computer security researcher and a member of the GDI Foundation, discovered the databases and informed TechCrunch. Although they were not able to identify the owner, after contacting the hosting provider, it disconnected the databases so that they were not accessible .
For Facebook, this is only the last of a long list of incidents related to (the lack) of privacy . The nightmare began with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, aired in 2018, and just a few weeks ago we knew that Facebook would have to pay a historical fine of 5,000 million dollars for not adequately protecting the data of its users. And now, this.
Via | TechCrunch
