1.4m Finnish names posted online after Facebook data leak
Published : 04 Apr 2021, 21:22
Updated : 04 Apr 2021, 22:03
About 1.4 million Facebook user accounts from Finland were leaked and posted online as a part of the leakage of the data of 533 million Facebook users across the globe, said the Finnish transport and communications agency-Traficom on Saturday.
Alon Gal of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock discovered the data of the facebook users on Saturday.
Although the data was first scraped in 2019, it was posted on a forum on Saturday making it freely available to anyone with basic data skills.
The data of 1.4 million accounts from Finland included phone number, Facebook profile, date of birth, and email addresses, according to the Traficom’s Cyber Security Centre.
“According to the information available publicly, the attacker has managed to exploit a now-fixed vulnerability to steal a list of phone numbers from Facebook and then used them to get more data from the profiles,” said the Traficom in a statement.
Even if the phone numbers might have been hidden, it could be available now in the information published along with the profile.
A Facebook representative told the Business Insider that the data was scraped in 2019. Alon Gal tweeted that the leak was exceptionally broad, reported the national broadcaster Yle.
“This means if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked,” said the report, quoting the Twitter post of Gal.