As per the reports, personal data and information of 533 million Indian Facebook users was leaked online on April 3, 2021, on a hacker forum. This breach entails personal data such as phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios and email addresses.
Numerous media agencies are speculating that this leak was related to a vulnerability that was apparently patched back in 2019.
There was also a data breach, earlier this year in January when the phone numbers of almost 6 lakh Indian Facebook users were being sold via Telegram. This was a part of the 500 million users that were in the database. This data breach was associated with a previous incident that took place in 2019.
The bot is said to exploit all the weaknesses of Facebook to have gained access to every Facebook account across all countries. This bot was selling each number for $15 or ₹1500, whereas batches of 10,000 numbers were being sold for $5000.
If a Facebook account is linked to a phone number, the bot can have access to all the information which can be misused for fraudulent purposes. There is also a major concern for email and phone number related phishing attacks and hacking attacks.
In 2019, the vulnerability in question was when phone numbers linked to over 400 million Facebook users surfaced on the web.The company also claimed that the server contained around 220 million records. It is still to be seen if the latest breach of privacy and security has anything to do with Facebook’s numerous privacy-related issues around the world, as well as court cases.
Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in India has filed a case against UK-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and Global Science Research LTD (GSRL) because of the major Facebook data harvesting controversy that occurred in 2017 and 2018. They are probed and questioned in regards to the “illegally harvesting the personal data of Facebook users in India.” In fact, around 5.62 Lakh Indian users were allegedly affected by this data harvesting.
Facebook has been questioned various times, in terms of their security and privacy related issues. It used to be one of the most trusted apps when it was an upcoming startups in India. However, with continuation of such incidents, it is hard to keep up with their claim on security and privacy.
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