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Massive leak leaves 267 million Facebook users' data exposed

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Friday, 20 December, 2019, 10:40
Massive leak leaves 267 million Facebook users' data exposed

While Facebook's busy making its own OS, millions of the company's users' data has been leaked, thanks to one of the largest data leaks in the company's history.

Cybersecurity firm Comparitech and researcher Bob Diachenko say they've found a database containing the Facebook IDs, phone numbers, and names of 267 million users on the web. The database, they claim, was entirely exposed on the internet and did not require a password or any other form of authentication to access.

They posit that the origins of the database probably lie in Facebook API abuse by criminals in Vietnam or an illegal data scraping operation. While Diachenko immediately notified the ISP hosting the data, he warns that it was available for two weeks before it was removed. It was also available as a download on a hacker forum.