61 Lakh Indians Among 53.3 Crore Facebook Users Whose Personal Data Was Leaked

New Delhi: Facebook is one of the major social media platforms in India. According to database company Statista, 32 crore users active on Facbook are Indians. It was quite shocking that the personal data of nearly 53.3 crore Facebook users, including 61 lakh Indians, reemerged online after a hacker posted the details on a digital forum.

The leaked data includes Facebook ID numbers, profile names, email addresses, location information, gender details, job data, and other details.

The easy availability of such data may make users more vulnerable to cybercrime, although Facebook has said that this is “old data”.

“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 has confirmed the leak to The Record.

“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” a Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying in the report late Saturday.

With the data now entering the public domain, there is a real danger that this information can be widely used by cybercriminals for email or SMS spam, robocalls, extortion attempts, threats and harassment, etc.

The data is reportedly broken up into download packages by country.

As Cambridge Analytics still haunts nearly 87 million users, including over 5 lakh users from India, this has come as the biggest ever leak of a social media platform that has billions of users.

In January this year, reports first surfaced that the phone numbers of 533 million users were currently being sold via a bot on encrypted messaging platform Telegram, which came from a Facebook vulnerability that was patched by the social network in 2019.

According to a report in Motherboard, the person selling the database full of Facebook users’ phone numbers ($20 per number) lets customers lookup those numbers by using an automated Telegram bot.

(With Inputs from IANS)