A data leak involving personal details of hundreds of millions of Facebook users is being reviewed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The database is believed to contain a mix of Facebook profile names, phone numbers, locations and other facts about more than 530 million people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Facebook says the data is “old”, from a previously-reported leak in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the Irish DPC said it will work with Facebook, to make sure that is the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ireland’s regulator is critical to such investigations, as Facebook’s European headquarters is in Dublin, making it an important regulator for the EU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most recent data dump appears to contain the entire compromised database from the previous leak, which Facebook said it found and fixed more than a year and a half ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the dataset has now been published for free in a hacking forum, making it much more widely available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It covers 533 million people in 106 countries, according to researchers who have viewed the data. That includes 11 million Facebook users in the UK and more than 30 million Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not every piece of data is available for every user, but the large scale of the leak has prompted concern from cyber-security experts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\nThe DPC’s deputy commissioner Graham Doyle said the recent data dump “appears to be” from the previous leak – and that the data-scraping behind it had happened before the EU’s GDPR privacy legislation was in effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“However, following this weekend’s media reporting we are examining the matter to establish whether the dataset referred to is indeed the same as that reported in 2019,” he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phone issues
\nDespite the claims of the data being “old”, some security researchers remain concerned due to the unchanging nature of the data involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phone numbers, for example, are unlikely to have changed for many people in the past two to three years, and other information – such as a date of birth or hometown – never change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alon Gal, a well-known personality in cyber-security circles who tweets as @UnderTheBreach, wrote that the phone number database first appeared in January, where hackers could look up the phone database for a small fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the widespread leak of the database “means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked,” he tweeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data,” he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a cautionary tale on a colossal scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s actually terrifyingly common for companies to store customer data in large, unsecured databases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Often they are discovered by well-meaning security researchers and are either deleted or made safe swiftly before the bad guys stumble upon the treasure trove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, sometimes it’s too late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This case highlights that a company’s defence “we’ve fixed it now” is not good enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The horse had bolted long before the stable doors were closed. And clearly, the horse has been having a field day for years since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The database has likely changed criminal hands many times before now being offered for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Facebook may claim this is “an old story”, but clearly it’s one that keeps coming back to bite it – and, more importantly, its users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Presentational grey line
\nTroy Hunt, a security expert who runs HaveIBeenPwned – an online service for users to check if their information has been involved in a data breach – said queries were six times higher than normal since news of the database’s release broke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He also suggested that the leaked dataset could be very useful “for a targeted attack where you know someone’s name and country” – though it would be much harder to use for a blanket mass cyber-attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“But for spam based on using phone number alone, it’s gold,” he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Not just SMS, there are heaps of services that just require a phone number these days and now there’s hundreds of millions of them conveniently categorised by country with nice mail merge fields like name and gender.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A data leak involving personal details of hundreds of millions of Facebook users is being reviewed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC). The database is believed to contain a mix of Facebook profile names, phone numbers, locations and other facts about more than 530 million people. Facebook says the data is “old”, from a previously-reported … Continue reading “Facebook leak: Irish regulator probes ‘old’ data dump”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3238,"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237\/revisions\/3238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tech-battery.com\/batteriesblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}