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| Facebook. © AFP=News1 |
The world’s largest social network service (SNS) Facebook users reported that personal information such as phone numbers of about 500 million people was leaked.
Economic media Business Insider and Reuters reported on the 3rd (local time) that personal information of about 53 million people who use Facebook on an overseas hacking-related website has been disclosed as’virtually free’.
The personal information leaked on this day included the phone numbers, Facebook IDs, names, residences, birthdays, account creation dates, history (education, work experience, etc.), email addresses of Facebook users in 106 countries around the world.
Business Insider reported that it was found to be consistent as a result of verifying some of the leaked personal information by matching the phone number and e-mail address of Facebook users in public status.
Reuters added that he tried to contact the person who leaked the data via mobile messenger Telegram, but failed.
In this regard, Alan Gall, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Hudson Rock, an Israeli cybercrime intelligence company, said the data appears to be the same as the Facebook phone numbers that have been circulating among hackers since last January.
On the famous hacking information site that shares beginner-level hacking technology, an automatic advertisement was released saying that Facebook personal information was sold for just a few euros in January. The information is the same.
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| Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO <자료사진> © AFP=News1 |
According to the data released by Gal CTO on Twitter, the damage of personal information leakage was the most, with 3,231,5282 users in the US. In Europe, △France (1984,8559 people), △United Kingdom (11522328 people) and △Germany (645,4423 people) suffered a great deal of damage. The number of Korean nationals was 12,1744.
In response, Facebook said in a statement, “It seems that data was collected from a security vulnerability that was corrected in August 2019,” and “it is only very old data.”
However, Gal’s CTO warned that even years old data could be misused. “The malicious people will definitely use this level of data for’social engineering attacks’ or hacking attempts such as fraud and illegal marketing,” he said. “So far, Facebook has admitted the absolute negligence of such information leakage. I haven’t seen them do,” he criticized.
Social engineering attack refers to a technique of hacking a system by using the human vulnerability of the system operator, not the system.
This is not the first time Facebook has leaked personal information. Ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2016, British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytika collected data from 80 million Facebook users for political advertising, but it was revealed later, causing great controversy. At the time, Facebook promised to crack down on large-scale data collection activities.
“There is not much that Facebook can do in terms of security as the information has already been leaked,” said Gal CTO. “Facebook can notify users to be careful not to be scammed, such as potential phishing,” he said.