Telephone figures associated to over 400 million Facebook accounts have been listed for social media giant online in the recent privacy situation, US media revealed on Wednesday.
According to TechCruch, an exposed server has stored 419 million user documents in several databases, including 133 million U.S. accounts, over 50 million in Vietnam and 18 million in England.
The Facebook databases have identified user IDs, the distinctive numbers connected to each account, the phone numbers of the profiles, and the gender mentioned by some websites and their geographic places.
The server was not shielded by password, which means that anybody could access the databases and kept online until late Wednesday when TechCrunch contacted the site’s host.
Facebook confirmed components of the study, but downgraded exposure, stating that approximately half of the 419 million reported accounts had been confirmed so far.
It added that many of the entries were duplicate and old.
“The dataset is down, and we saw no proof of the compromise of Facebook accounts,” a Facebook spokesman informed AFP.
Following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Company disabled a function that enabled the customers to search through the platform by telephone numbers when using Facebook’s lax privacy settings to access millions of private information.
The exposure of a user’s telephone number makes them susceptible to spam calls and SIM swapping— like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had lately done— with hackers capable of forcibly resetting their accounts passwords.
Credit: Securityweek
