Facebook data on extra than 500M accounts observed on-line | Countrywide Information

NEW YORK (AP) — Information from extra than 500 million Fb users have been discovered accessible on a web page for hackers.

The details appears to be various years outdated, but it is a further example of the extensive sum of information and facts collected by Facebook and other social media web pages, and the limits to how safe that information is.

The availability of the details set was 1st reported by Small business Insider. In accordance to that publication, it has data from 106 nations around the world together with telephone figures, Fb IDs, total names, places, birthdates, and e mail addresses.

Facebook has been grappling with information safety challenges for a long time. In 2018, the social media large disabled a aspect that permitted people to research for one an additional by using cellphone selection subsequent revelations that the political agency Cambridge Analytica had accessed facts on up to 87 million Fb end users without the need of their know-how or consent.

In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher described finding a databases with the names, cell phone numbers and exclusive person IDs of additional than 267 million Facebook customers — almost all U.S.-based — on the open net. It is unclear if the existing information dump is associated to this databases.

“This is old info that was earlier documented on in 2019,” the Menlo Park, California-dependent enterprise stated in a assertion. “We found and fixed this concern in August 2019.”

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