A leaker claims to be giving away information on more than 500 million Facebook users for free, including phone numbers and other personal information.
According to Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybercrime intelligence company Hudson Rock, the database appears to be the same collection of Facebook-linked telephone numbers that has been circulating in hacker circles since January and whose presence was first recorded by tech publication Motherboard.
The information, which is being sold for a few euros in digital credit on a well-known platform for low-level hackers, was not immediately checked by Reuters, but Gal said on Saturday that he had verified the validity of at least some of the data by comparing it to phone numbers of people he knew.
Other journalists claim to have been able to fit known phone numbers to the data dump’s specifics as well.
Facebook said in a statement that the data was “very old” and linked to a bug it patched in August 2019.
Reuters’ attempt to contact the leaker via the Telegram messaging service was unsuccessful.
