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.
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