Phone numbers of 419 million Facebook accounts have just been leaked, 50 million accounts of users in Vietnam are affected

According to TechCrunch, a data block containing hundreds of millions of phone numbers connected to 419 million Facebook accounts has been discovered to exist on an online server but not protected by a password, anyone can access it. counter.

Including phone numbers of about 50 million user accounts in Vietnam, 133 million Facebook accounts in the US and 18 million accounts in the UK.

According to Facebook's feedback, the company analyzed this data block and detected duplicate records, so the number of users affected was only half that of the TechCrunch report. Facebook also added that there is currently no evidence that any user accounts are compromised.

Regarding the number of users affected by the leak, Facebook did not give an approximate estimate, but half of the report's number was equivalent to about 200 million users, more than the Cambridge Analytica affair earlier. year.

A security researcher has discovered that this security data block is in normal text form - completely unencrypted and notified to TechCrunch. It seems that this information was collected by a third party and leaked on the Internet. This data block is now offline after TechCrunch contacted the web host.

According to a Facebook representative, the cause of this data leak is the ability to find friends by phone number, which has been disabled since April 2018. Bad guys can take advantage of this feature to collect information, including phone numbers from user accounts.

According to Facebook, this data block was old and contained only information before the feature of finding friends via phone number was removed.

It is difficult to understand who collected the phone number from Facebook to put on the server and for what purpose.

According to Tech Cruch, to avoid security and privacy risks, users should refrain from using their phone numbers publicly on any online databases.

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