Facebook: "Personal Data Leak of 530 Million Users Occurred Before September 2019"

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwon Jae-hee] Facebook, the world's largest social networking service (SNS), stated on the 6th (local time) that the personal information leak of 530 million users "was extracted before September 2019."

This explanation came after the economic media Business Insider reported on the 3rd that personal information of 530 million Facebook users was disclosed on a hacking online forum.

Facebook said through its newsroom, "Malicious actors did not hack the system before September 2019 but scraped data from the platform," adding, "This is a common method relying on automated software and was reported in 2019."

In 2019, there was a legal dispute over whether extracting user profile data from SNS constituted hacking.

Facebook stated, "Measures were taken at the time to prevent data scraping, and such issues no longer occur."

According to the report, information of Facebook users from 106 countries worldwide was leaked. This included phone numbers, Facebook IDs, names, residences, birthdays, histories, email addresses, and gender information.

Business Insider verified some of the leaked personal information by matching it with known Facebook user phone numbers.

Facebook explained that the leaked information did not include passwords, financial, or health information.

Regarding this, Allen Gall, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Israeli cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, tweeted, "Bad actors will definitely use the leaked information for hacking, fraud, and marketing," urging "SNS users to check their privacy settings and strengthen account security."

This is not the first time Facebook user information has been leaked. Ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it was revealed late that British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected data of 80 million Facebook users for political advertising, causing controversy.