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.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they