Massive Facebook data breach | Eastern NC Now

Sundance at The Last Refuge is reporting:

An absolute goldmine for identity thieves was released to the web by a hack into the Facebook database.  Business Insider is reporting the personal information from 533 million Facebook users was hacked including: 32+ million records on U.S. with their “phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, & email addresses.”

Do not be surprised if the data removed ultimately attributes to a particular political and social grouping of users that Facebook identified and categorized.  There is a very reasonable suspicion the release of the information could be ideologically targeted.

(Via Business Insider) – A user in a low level hacking forum has published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online.

The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.

[…] “A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts,” Gal told Insider.

Facebook did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment.

Gal first discovered the leaked data in January when a user in the same hacking forum advertised an automated bot that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users in exchange for a price. Motherboard reported on that bot’s existence at the time and verified that the data was legitimate.

Now, the entire dataset has been posted on the hacking forum for free, making it widely available to anyone with rudimentary data skills.  (read more)

Source:  Massive Facebook Hack - 533 Million Users Compromised Including 32 Million Americans, Facebook IDs, Names, Phone Numbers, Birthdates, Email Addresses - The Last Refuge (theconservativetreehouse.com)