Data affecting more than 500 million Facebook users that was originally leaked in 2019, including e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, has been posted on an online hackers forum, according to media reports and a cybercrime expert.
“All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free,” Alon Gal, chief technology officer at the Hudson Rock cybercrime intelligence firm, wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
He denounced what he called the “absolute negligence” of Facebook.
Some of the data appeared to be current, said a Business Insider report that Agence France-Presse was unable to confirm independently.
It said that some of the leaked telephone numbers still belong to the owners of Facebook accounts.
“This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked,” Gal said.
However, Facebook said the reports were old news.
“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” a company spokesperson said. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
Close to 32 million US accounts and 20 million French accounts were among those affected, Gal tweeted in January, when the person holding the data was trying to sell it.
The data include telephone numbers, complete names, birth dates and, for some accounts, e-mail addresses and relationship status.
“Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking and marketing,” Gal wrote on Twitter.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Japan is to downgrade its description of ties with China from “one of its most important” in an annual diplomatic report, according to a draft reviewed by Reuters, as relations with Beijing worsen. This year’s Diplomatic Bluebook, which Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is expected to approve next month, would instead describe China as an important neighbor and the relationship as “strategic” and “mutually beneficial.” The draft cites a series of confrontations with Beijing over the past year, including export controls on rare earths, radar lock-ons targeting Japanese military aircraft and increased pressure around Taiwan. The shift in tone underscores a deterioration
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German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) yesterday faced a regional election battle in Rhineland-Palatinate, now held by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Merz’s CDU has enjoyed a narrow poll lead over the SPD — their coalition partners at the national level — who have ruled the mid-sized state for 35 years. Polling third is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which spells a greater threat to the two centrist parties in several state elections in September in the country’s ex-communist east. The picturesque state of Rhineland-Palatinate, bordering France, Belgium and Luxembourg and with a population of about 4 million,
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