Billions Of Facebook Users Have Just Got Their Data Leaked

Billions of Facebook users have just got their data leaked including information on their phone numbers, IDs, full name, locations, email addresses, phone numbers, and more. In the affected, there are hundreds of crypto users that could become a target to sim swapping so let’s read more in our latest crypto news today.

According to a security analyst, the sensitive personal information for billions of Facebook users was leaked on a hacking forum earlier today which is a potential risk for millions of crypto traders that could become vulnerable to sim swapping and many other ID based attacks. The situation was initially discovered by Alon Gal who is the CTO of security company Hudson Rock that posted on Twitter about it.

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.

I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8

— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021

According to Gal, the leak is related to a security vulnerability that was initially discovered two years ago. However, this year it became known that the hackers are able to use the information and access users’ phone numbers with the leak including Facebook IDs, full names, locations, phone numbers, birthdates, email addresses, and more. According to Gal the information could enable attackers to deploy hundreds of different social manipulation exploits:

 “Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking and marketing.”

Crypto users are at risk of these attacks and as we saw at the start of the year, a victim of a sim-swapping attack sued T-Mobile for $450,000, and back in 2018 Kaspersky Labs found that the hackers stole about 21,000 ETH that is now worth $43 million in a social engineering attack over a period of a year. The data breach is of a huge magnitude than the Ledger breach a year ago. Shortly after 270,000 users’ info was leaked online with users reporting extortionists threats and considered lawsuits against the hardware wallet company.

As previously reported, BitMEX traders started getting phishing attacks after they had their details leaked as a part of the recent privacy breach that happened on the exchange. The crypto exchange accidentally leaked about 23,000 of its users’ email addresses earlier this month. One Reddit user disclosed more details about how the phishing attacks started against him after the leak. Apparently there is an email from Blockchain.com that redirects Bitmex traders to a different website to eventually download the malware onto the system.