The data is now available on a hacker forum to download.
Another day, another data breach putting the privacy of hundreds of millions of Facebook users at risk. It all started with a database that stored a massive trove of personal information of more than 267 million (267,140,436) users.
The database was originally discovered on December 4th by IT security researcher Bob Diachenko who partnered with Comparitech security firm for a detailed analysis. According to researchers, the database was hosted on an Elasticsearch server and left exposed for public access without any password or security protocol.
See: Stolen: Unencrypted hard drives with data of 29,000 Facebook employees
Although the database did not contain email addresses or passwords of Facebook users, it did provide absolute access to phone numbers associated with Facebook profiles, full names, a unique ID for each account and timestamp.
According to the company’s blog post, most of the exposed data belonged to users in the United States which should not come as a surprise since 70% of the US citizens are active on Facebook which means that out of the country’s total population of 327.2 million, roughly 232.6 million people are on Facebook.
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