Facebook has once again suffered a Cambridge Analytica like incident. This time, the researcher discovered millions of Facebook users’ data exposed online on an unsecured server. The database allegedly leaked details of over 419 million Facebook users accounts.
419M Facebook Users Accounts Data Leaked
Security researcher Sanyam Jain who has previously reported numerous unsecured databases has made a similar discovery. The researcher stumbled upon an open database exposing details of millions of Facebook users accounts.
According to the details he shared with TechCrunch, the unsecured server he discovered contained over 419 million users’ records. This is a huge number – comparable to the data exposed during the Cambridge Analytica incident.
Of these 419 million records, almost half the data comes from users from three countries only. Specifically, 133 million records which belonged to US-based users, 50 million records to Vietnam users and 18 million records belonged to the UK users.
The exposed records included the unique Facebook ID of the users and the associated phone numbers. Whereas for some records, users’ names, gender, and location were also present.
TechCrunch could also verify the authenticity of these records by checking some of the known accounts.
Facebook Claims No Compromise
Jain and TechCrunch were able to determine the leaky database’s ownership and reported the matter to the web host, following which, the leaky database went offline.
As for Facebook, when contacted, officials claim that the accounts remained uncompromised. A Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch about the possibility of the database to have scraped data.
This data set is old and appears to have information obtained before we made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers. The data set has been taken down and we have seen no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised.
It also remains unclear as to who scraped the data and for what purpose.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
