Schedule – Technical Science – You can also check if Facebook has leaked your phone number

For ten years now, Facebook has been asking us to provide our site with a phone number for “our security” that has not been sent or sold to any third party. At most, it was stolen and leaked to the public …

533 million phone numbers are in the air

This is exactly what happened to the more than 533 million people whose phone numbers were leaked to an online database containing mostly mobile numbers.

Since there is a legitimate need to think about whether Facebook users are at 533 million or not, a website has now been set up where anyone can enter their phone number to verify this.

Involvement in the latest Facebook data breach a I have become Pwned (With an American argument: “Were they deceived?”).

Data theft came from an “old” robbery incident in 2019, but data security officials are already investigating the case in several countries.

“Don’t worry, we fixed it a long time ago”

According to Facebook, the robbery was discovered and fixed a year and a half ago. It is not clear what the English word for “standard” on the platform is, but until they “improve” it is certain that the information is now published for free.

According to analysts who analyzed the data, the database covers 533 million users in 106 countries. This includes 11 million Facebook users in the UK, 30 million Americans and 7 million Australians. And information about a page called Kiberblog According to There are 377 thousand Hungarians involved in the data leak, 208 of whom work in some ministry.

Not all data is available to all users of the website, but it is certain that 500 million phone numbers have been leaked against “a few million email addresses,” says Troy Hunt. HaveIBeenPwned Security expert who runs the site on his own website blog.

The search generated terrible traffic

Hunt has experienced “unprecedented traffic” after introducing a phone number search feature on his website following rumors of a Facebook data leak. Previously, users of the site could only search for email addresses here.

Visitors to the website can now type their mobile number into a search box and the site will check if it is in the leaked database.

I wanted everyone to answer this question

Says Hunt.

Another source found that Facebook’s own CEO Mark Zuckerberg had leaked his mobile number to the database.

This phone number is associated with Zuckerberg’s account from a recent Facebook leak

Security expert Dave Walker tweeted that he also questioned the screen shot of the phone number.

Screenshot Zuckerberg claims to have been on the Signaling Messaging platform – it uses end-to-end encryption and does not belong to Facebook.

We have been asked to do this since 2011

Facebook has been asking users to provide their phone number since 2011 citing security reasons. This solution allows them to use “two-factor authentication”, an additional feature that sends text to a user’s mobile phone when someone logs into their account.

At the same time, the technology company advises users to check what details are publicly shared on the platform, “How do people find and find you?” And completion of “regular data security audits”.

Facebook added that the data was extracted through “data scraping” using “public information” available on the computer, rather than being hacked.

Data protection officers began

Meanwhile, several investigations have been launched against Facebook by data security officials worldwide. For example, the Irish Data Protection Authority said it was working with a technology company to determine if “the specified data set is actually equivalent to the data reported in 2019.” The National Data Protection Commission of the Philippines and the Office of the Hong Kong Data Protection Commissioner have launched an investigation into the breach.

(BBC)

(Cover: Rafael Henrik / Sofa Pictures / Lightrocket / Getty Images)