Over 267 Million Facebook Users' Data Leaked on the Dark Web

Social media giant Facebook has found themselves in more hot water recently as reports of a database containing the data of over 267 million users were found online. The database, discovered by security researcher Bob Diachenko and Comparitech, was left completely exposed without even a password to prevent unauthorized access. 

Diachenko said that the Elasticsearch cluster contained the ID’s, real names, and phone numbers of primarily American users. It is believed that the data came from “an illegal scraping operation or Facebook API abuse by criminals in Vietnam.” 

The database – now unavailable – was out in the open for all to see for two weeks. It first appeared on December 4 and – even though it’s gone now – it was allegedly shared on a forum on the dark web for hackers to download. 

While that doesn’t sound like too much data per individual, it is still more than enough to target people for phishing attacks. A spokesperson from Facebook said that the company is “looking into the issue, but believe this is likely information obtained before changes we made in the past few years to better protect people’s information.”

It’s unfortunate for Facebook that they can’t even get through one year without having some kind of major scandal. For example, back in September, there was another database like this. This database contained the data for 419 million users. That’s to say nothing of the whole Cambridge Analytica debacle that was so bad Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was summed to Washington to testify before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce and House Committee on Energy and Commerce. 

Not that Facebook seems to care too much about these breaches given the money they’ve got. They can throw all the money they need at the problem to make it go away. The company announced during their earnings call in April that they had set aside some $3 billion to pay off fines and other legal problems.