Beware if you are a Facebook user and have added your phone number on the social media platform as there are chances that your data, including your phone number and country name may be up for sale!
In a recent breach of data security, nearly 500 million facebook users' data across the globe is being sold through a telegram bot.
The case of data exploitation came under the scanner, when a security researcher named Alon Gal shared the issue on his Twitter account. He even shared photos reporting the number of users whose data has been compromised across the different nations.
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According to researcher Alon Gal, the alleged user who is running the Telegram bot is taking advantage of the data security vulnerability found in Facebook in the year 2020, which allowed anyone to gain access to the phone numbers linked to different Facebook accounts.
Here is a list of countries being affected with the security breach
Full list of affected users by country pic.twitter.com/Wrrzd0WyxE
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) January 14, 2021
As per the reports, nearly users from nearly 100 countries were affected as their sensitive data was compromised. It is noted that though the exploitation occurred in 2019, but the data still holds accurate as a large number of users don't change their phone numbers more frequently. In India, more than six lakh users were affected by this.
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Alon in his twitter post said, “In early 2020 a vulnerability that enabled seeing the phone number linked to every Facebook account was exploited, creating a database containing the information 533m users across all countries.It was severely under-reported and today the database became much more worrisome.”
“Few days ago a user created a Telegram bot allowing users to query the database for a low fee, enabling people to find the phone numbers linked to a very large portion of Facebook accounts. This obviously has a huge impact on privacy,” he shared in another tweet.
According to Motherboard's report, if someone has a user's phone number, then they can find their Facebook ID with the help of Telegram bot. However, the information is not free and for accessing the sensitive information, they will be required to pay a certain amount. The person who created the Telegram bot is selling a phone number or Facebook ID for $20. The bot is also selling Facebook users’ data in bulk. For 10,000 credits, the bot is charging $5,000, the report added.
Alan further expressed his concern over the security issue and said it is important that Facebook notify its users of this breach so they are less likely to fall victim to different hacking and social engineering attempts.
