Hacked Data Of Over 500 Million Facebook Users Leaked Online

Facebook has dealt with data breaches before, and as of this weekend, there’s another major scandal to add to this shameful list. That’s because the data of over 500 million Facebook users — including names, birthdays, relationship status, birthplace, email addresses, and more — recently leaked on a website for hackers.

The data, which was reportedly obtained via scraping, largely dates to 2019. For its part, Facebook says that it addressed this issue back then.

“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” Facebook director of strategic response communications Liz Bourgeois tweeted on Saturday.

However, just because Facebook is aware of this problem doesn’t mean it won’t have lasting consequences. After all, there’s a good chance that a ton of the data leaked this weekend is still applicable to users, meaning it could still be valuable to hackers and other bad actors. This data scraping technique is also what got Facebook into trouble during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, so it’s clear that the company hasn’t taken all the steps necessary to protect users following that privacy disaster. Hopefully Facebook takes swift action to clean up its mess this time around — and notifies users who were affected.

If you would like to see if you were affected by this and other data breaches, then head over to HaveIBeenPwned.com and enter your email address.




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