Facebook, much like every social media platform or messaging app has fallen under scrutiny of late in regard to the privacy status of the private information of its users, and a recent hacking issue saw as many as 533 million Facebook users from across the world (106 countries) have their personal data leaked and subsequently published on a forum.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, among the leaked private Facebook information was the telephone/mobile numbers of the social media giant’s many global users, as well as other sorts of personal data such as people’s full names, locations and dates of birth. In some cases, even the personal e-mail addresses linked with the Facebook accounts of the site’s users ended up being published on the forum.
The respected publication Business Insider, located in New York, checked some of the published data and confirmed that it was indeed authentic data.
“The published data could be extremely important for cybercriminals who could use such personal data for fraud,” warned Alon Gal, a cybersecurity expert who first pointed out this new security issue for Facebook’s countless international users.
“A database of this size holding the private data of Facebook users such as their phone numbers will certainly lead to criminals using that data,” Gal told Business Insider.
Gal also looked at the Facebook user data which was leaked on a country by country basis. When it comes to the Republic of Croatia, that number alarmingly reached as many as 659,115 Croatian Facebook users, as was recently reported Vecernji list.
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