Personal data of 533 million Facebook users posted online

Article by Adrian Ma

More than 533 million Facebook users had their personal information posted on a hacking forum website last week, which has reignited debate about the social media giant’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities. 

The exposed data, which includes phone numbers, email addresses and locations, is from a massive data breach at Facebook that took place in 2019. At the time, the company identified the security error and fixed it. But someone made a copy of that personal information and posted the dataset on the hacking website, Business Insider reports.

The data is a couple of years old and many users may have updated their password and personal details since then. But there are concerns that cybercriminals could use pieces of someone’s personal information to impersonate them or scam them.

“A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social-engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts,” said Alon Gal, the chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence company Hudson Rock. 

Identity theft is a growing concern around the world, including Canada. Incidents of identity theft have more than quintupled since 2010, according to data from Statistics Canada. 

Facebook, the most popular social media network in the world with more than 2.7 billion active monthly users, has come under fire in recent years for a series of issues involving personal information and privacy. In 2013, the company sold the personal information of up to 87 million users to British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to help inform their political advertising strategies. In May 2018, a glitch in the platform caused the private posts of 14 million users to be made public without their knowledge or consent. In September 2018, another Facebook bug saw hackers gain access to the full profiles of at least 50 million users.

Interactive timeline of company data breaches from 2013 to 2020. (Timeline by Adrian Ma)

Despite these controversies and concerns, Facebook continues to grow its user base and is widely expected to reach three billion active users — the first social media company in history to hit this milestone — sometime in the next two years.