Facebook leaked personal information of 500 million people around the world… Including 120,000 Koreans (total)

Input 2021.04.04 07:56 | Revision 2021.04.04 15:00

Estimated damage of about 10% of Korean Facebook users
Phone number, address, birthday, history, etc.
Facebook “What was discovered in 2019 and has already been resolved”
“Even years old, there is room for abuse in cybercrime”

Reuters reported on the 3rd (local time) that personal information such as phone numbers of more than 500 million Facebook users were leaked. It is known that information about 120,000 Korean users is included. Considering that the number of Facebook users in Korea is about 10 million, about 10% of personal information was leaked. Facebook, which was controversial over a large-scale information leak in 2016, was also on the cutting board due to the leak of user information.

According to Reuters, personal information of about 53 million Facebook users has been disclosed virtually for free on a hacking online bulletin board. This personal information belongs to Facebook users in 106 countries around the world, including phone number, Facebook ID, name, place of residence, birthday, history, and email address.

Business Insider said that as a result of collating several samples, the leaked information and the actual Facebook user information matched. The largest number of personal information leakage cases were in the United States (32 million), followed by France (19 million), the United Kingdom (11 million), and India (6 million). It is known that information on Korean users is also included in 12,1744.

“If you have a Facebook account, it’s very likely that the phone number used to create the account has been leaked,” said Alan Galle, co-founder and chief technology officer at Hudson Rock, an Israeli cybercrime intelligence company. It seems to be the same as the Facebook phone number that has been circulating among hackers since January of this year.”

In a statement, Facebook explained, “The data were reported in 2019, and were discovered and resolved in August of that year.” However, Gal CTO warned that even years-old data could be useful to cybercriminals trying to use personal information to pretend to be someone else or steal login information.

“A database of this size that contains private information, such as the phone numbers of many Facebook users, will certainly be used by bad guys to launch social engineering attacks or hacking attempts,” said Gal CTO. Social engineering attack refers to a hacking technique using the vulnerability of the person operating the system, not the security vulnerability of the system.

He said that there is not much that Facebook can do in terms of security, as the information has already been leaked, but that Facebook can notify users to beware of potential phishing or scams.

This is not the first time Facebook leaks user personal information. Ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytika collected data from 80 million Facebook users for political advertising, but it was revealed later that it became a big controversy.