Massive Facebook security breach exposes data of over 4 million Libyan users

A security breach on Facebook has left the data of half a billion users exposed to the public

BY Libyan Express Apr 05, 2021 - 23:48

This isn’t the first instance of a security breach in Facebook as the tech giant continues to grapple with security issues. [Photo: Internet]

A large scale cyber attack on one of the world’s most popular social media platforms, Facebook, has resulted in the private data of over 530 million accounts being revealed to the public, including phone numbers, full names and home addresses.

The information appears to be several years old, but it is another example of the vast amount of information collected by Facebook and other social media sites, and the limits to how secure that information is.

Security experts argue that while the data is outdated it can still be used by criminals to commit identity fraud as well as possibly stalking.

Alon Gal; CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who first discovered the entire trough of leaked data online said, “A database of that size containing 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.”

Facebook has been grappling with data security issues for years.

The data records include the information of 4.2 million users in Libya. 32 million users in the United States, 11 million users in the United Kingdom, and 6 million users in India.

A spokesperson for the social media giant told ‘Business insider’ that the data leak was made possible due to a vulnerability the company had patched in 2019.

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