Facebook Data On 533 Million Users From 2019 Reemerges On Hacking Forum, Including Over 86k From Maldives

A user in a low-level hacking forum on Saturday published the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online – making it widely available to anyone with rudimentary data skills.

The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 86k users from the Maldives – containing such as their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses. Over 32 million accounts in the US, 11 million in the UK, and 6 million in India were exposed.

Facebook has been grappling with data security issues for years. This particular vulnerability that was initially uncovered in 2019 allowed millions of people's phone numbers to be scraped from Facebook's servers in violation of its terms of service. However, Facebook states that the vulnerability was patched in August 2019.

Even though the leaked data is a couple of years old, it could provide valuable information to cybercriminals and is another clear example of the vast amount of information collected by Facebook and other social media platforms and the limits to how secure that information is.