419 million records from Facebook accounts were leaked
A public server with more than 419 million records from Facebook users was discovered online. The server did not take any password protection measures, which means anyone can access it. This server has 1.33 records from US Facebook users, 18 million users from the UK, and 50 million users from Vietnam.
The record contains the unique ID of each user on Facebook and the mobile number listed in the account. The Facebook ID is a unique number associated with an account that can find a person’s username. Since Facebook has restricted access to mobile phone numbers for more than a year, the data that is now exposed is relatively old. “This data set is old and appears to have information obtained before we made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers,” the spokesperson said. “The data set has been taken down and we have seen no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised.”
TechCrunch can verify multiple records in the database by matching the mobile phone number of a known Facebook user with a listed Facebook ID. Other records can be verified by matching the phone number to Facebook’s password reset feature. Although these records primarily contain mobile numbers, in some cases it also includes username, gender, and country location.
It is reported that this database was originally discovered by security researcher Sanyam Jain, who said he could find the phone numbers of several celebrities. It’s unclear who owns the database, and it’s not clear where it came from, but it was taken offline after TechCrunch contacted the site host.
Source: TechCrunch
