Facebook investigating massive data leak of 267 million users

Around 267 million people were affected by a data breach that shocked Facebook last week. The social media behemoth released a statement on Thursday saying that it had launched an investigation into the matter. The database was published on an online hacker forum that apparently belonged to a crime group. The database contained personal information like IDs, phone numbers, names, etcetera. Most of the users targeted in the attack are from the United States. 

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Data of Facebook users compromised 

The database was released online by a group of four men who published the data in a downloadable file on the forum. Comparitech, a company that looks into VPNs, password managers, ID theft protection, antivirus, internet providers, network monitoring, and more has partnered with Facebook to investigate the matter. 

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Bob Diachenko, a security officer with Comparitech first spotted the data breach, which was openly available for download on the illegal forum. After discovering the database on an online forum, Diachenko immediately sent an abuse report to the ISP managing the IP address of the server and then removed the database from the online forum. Data of over 260 million users were leaked online that could be misused by telemarketing callers and spam purveyors. Scammers can now start new phishing scams with the help of the data. The data was available for almost two weeks on the forum before it was removed. 

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There is no information on how users will identify whether their Facebook account was hacked or not. However, this is not the first time when Facebook is involved in such a controversy. Last year, Facebook was engulfed in a major controversy where it was revealed that the social media giant was involved with a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica in harvesting data of millions of users without their consent and used it for political advertising purposes. 

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