Facebook data of 533 million users leaked online

A hacker has posted the personal data, including Facebook ID numbers, profile names, email addresses, location information, gender details, job data and other details, of nearly 533 million Facebook users, including 61 lakh Indians, on a digital forum.

"All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked," tweeted Alon Gal, CTO of security firm Hudson Rock. "I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data," he added.

Facebook, while confirming the leak, also reiterated that this is 'old data' from 2019. With the data now out in the public domain, it could be used by cybercriminals for email or SMS spam, robocalls, extortion attempts, threats and harassment, etc. The new leak is larger than the Cambridge Analytics data breach, where data of nearly 87 million users was compromised.