Hundreds of millions of users\u0027 phone numbers have been uncovered in an open online database, the social networking giant Facebook said on Wednesday, the latest example of Facebook\u0027s 'lapses' that are back to haunt its users.
A specialized website revealed that some 419 million Facebook IDs and logs and phone numbers were stored in an online server that was not password-protected.
The database, which was found on an open server in a host network, included 133 million user records in the United States, 18 million in Britain and 50 million in Vietnam, according to TechCrunch.
Each record has a unique Facebook ID for the user and the phone number listed in the account. Usually, the Facebook user ID is a long, unique, and public number associated with its account, and can be easily used to identify the account\u0027s username.
Security researcher and member of the GDI group, Saniam Jain, found the database and contacted TechCrunch after he could not find the original owner of the user database.
Jain said he found profiles with phone numbers associated with many celebrities.
Facebook spokesman Jay Nankaro told TechCrunch that the data had been canceled before Facebook cut off access to users\u0027 phone numbers.
After a connection from TechCrunch with the network hosting this data, the connection with the database was disconnected.
The Facebook network confirmed the report, saying it was investigating the time when the database was compiled and to whom, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.
A spokeswoman for the company claimed that the actual number of users whose information was displayed was about 210 million, because 419 million records contained duplicates.
The records are likely to be compiled using a tool Facebook disabled in April 2018 following the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Facebook also confirmed that the data disclosed was 'outdated' and would have been canceled before the policy change in April 2018.
'This dataset is outdated and appears to have received information before we made changes last year to remove the ability of people to find others using their phone numbers,' a company spokeswoman said in a statement. .
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The spokeswoman did not respond to questions about whether Facebook would notify users whose information was disclosed or provide any compensation to those affected, but said the company was 'still investigating the matter.'
Although Facebook\u0027s description of the data as 'outdated', phone numbers are an increasingly important key to people\u0027s identities and potential vulnerabilities.
While not as sensitive as a social security number, they are important “identifiers” that can be used to easily obtain large amounts of personal information about an individual and their family from online data brokers, The New York Times reported.
Hackers and skilled hackers can, often, take advantage of a mobile phone number and information obtained through data brokers or social networking sites, such as home address, previous addresses, family members, etc., to persuade mobile phone companies to transfer the target phone number to a different phone.
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Another notable victim of this type of attack, known as swapping or swapping 'SIM' cards, was Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, whose Twitter account was kidnapped Friday by a hacked group that seems to have gotten control of his mobile number.
On Wednesday, Twitter announced that the account was temporarily disabled for users\u0027 ability to send tweets via SMS or text messages, due to 'security vulnerabilities that must be addressed by mobile phone companies.'
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which more than 80 million profiles were leaked to help identify swing voters in the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook and its affiliates, such as Instagram, have seen numerous incidents of massive leaks of user data
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