Data from more than 267 million Facebook users have been leaked on the dark web. “The database, which was online for two weeks, contained 267,140,436 unique IDs, full names and phone numbers of – mainly American – users,” said security expert Bob Diachenko, who discovered the leak.
The huge leak was discovered by cybersecurity company Comparitech in collaboration with security researcher Bob Diachenko. The unsecured database contained the IDs, phone numbers, and full names of 267 million users, most of whom live in the US.
The data was also uploaded in a hackers forum on the dark web. That is a part of the internet that you cannot find with standard browsers or Google, and that is very popular with criminals.
Bob Diachenko discovered the user data on December 14. The database was not protected by a password or other security and would have been “open” for almost two weeks.
According to security expert Bob Diachenko, the data was probably collected by illegal scraping, possibly by criminals from Vietnam. To prevent criminals from “scraping” information from your Facebook profile, you can arrange in your settings that search engines cannot link to your profile.
Cambridge Analytica
A Facebook spokesperson said the company is investigating the leak. It is not the first time that Facebook has encountered problems with privacy.
The best-known example is the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. Besides, a leak of data from users ended up with the Cambridge Analytica campaign agency.
For example, Cambridge Analytica had unauthorised access to the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users. That information was used, among other things, for the 2016 Donald Trump election campaign.