Sanyam Jain, a security researcher, revealed an unprotected server that stores database containing 419 million phone numbers which belong to facebook users. The researcher is stating this data breach as five times bigger than Cambridge Analytica data breach.
133 million affected users are from the U.S., 18 million users from the U.K.; this data breach has affected five times more people than the Cambridge Analytica, which affected only 87 million people.
Sanyam also reported that out of the leaked phone numbers, most of them were linked to Facebook usernames, genders, and country. As soon as Sanyam contacted the server operator, the server was taken offline, and there was no further explanation provided about this mistake.
Facebook’s explanation…
Facebook explained the data breach to TechCrunch saying that the data is obsolete and have information before facebook made moderation in removing user’s ability to search someone using their phone number, the data has been taken down, and no facebook accounts were harmed or exposed.
Even if the statement of facebook is true, year-old numbers are not old at all, if a user has been using that same number for a decade, the full explanation of Facebook makes no sense.
Facebook explained it made changes to how third-parties can access its user data and has helped in preventing significant data leaks. However, this doesn’t satisfy its users as the company has not gone so far with its restrictions.
This year, a lot of data breaching cases of Facebook surfaced. The Instagram data breach was also highlighted as an over a million passwords were stored in readable formats.
