The phone number of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was discovered in the leaked data of 533 million Facebook users. According to a source, Zuckerberg's other information, including his name, birth date, location, marriage details, and Facebook user ID, were also exposed in the compromised data in what could be considered one of the largest data breaches ever. This shocking development comes at a time when WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, is still under fire for its controversial privacy policies. Several other homegrown messaging platforms, such as Signal, Telegram, Koo, and others, are gaining popularity.
Furthermore, the data appears to have been obtained by abusing a flaw that allowed automated scripts to mass-scrape Facebook users' public profiles and associated private phone numbers. Facebook has since patched the bug.
This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019. https://t.co/mPCttLkjzE
— Liz Bourgeois (@Liz_Shepherd) April 3, 2021
Even as it emerges largely unscathed from the Cambridge Analytica data debacle, in which the British consultancy firm amassed the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent for political purposes, the fact that the data seems to have been accessed by scraping Facebook profiles complicates the company's equation with privacy.
However, since the data is now freely accessible to the public, malicious adversaries are likely to use it for social engineering, marketing scams, and other cybercrimes. Smishing attacks, spam calls, and fraud are all possibilities for users who have shared their phone numbers and email addresses with Facebook and have not updated them since 2019.
Image Source: The Hacker News
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