A Mashable report claims that 200,000 Facebook Marketplace users’ personal information was discovered on the dark web. Names, phone numbers, email addresses, and details from Facebook profiles are among the data that was compromised. Bleeping Computers broke the initial story about the data leak, claiming that it was discovered on a dark web forum. The outlet went on to say that “algoatson” on Discord was the hacker who stole the data. As of right now, Meta has not formally commented on the leak’s news.
“In October 2023, a cyber criminal by the name of ‘algoatson’ on Discord, breached a contractor that manages cloud services for Facebook and stole its partial user database of 200,000 entries,” Bleeping Computers said in its report.
Reports of this kind of data leak have surfaced before. According to Mashable, information about 530 million Facebook users was exposed in an online forum in 2021.
Two years before it was eventually discovered floating in the dark web, the data was first compromised in 2019. Consequently, Meta was hit with a 265 million euro fine for breaking the GDPR, an EU law that safeguards user privacy.
The phone numbers of Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz—three of Facebook’s founders—were also exposed in the 2021 data leak.
How to protect your Facebook data
The Office of the New York State Attorney General has listed some of the steps to ensure your data remains safe. These are:
- Check your active Facebook sessions frequently to prevent unauthorised use of your account
- Review the conditions before running Facebook apps and games
- Be vague with basic profile information, such as your hometown, employer, birth date, and contact information. Set the audience for this information to Friends or Only Me
- Use the app specific privacy controls
Apart from these basic steps, users can also change the passwords of their accounts and turn on two-factor authentication as a second layer of verification.
Read More
3rd Test: Ashwin, Jurel Take India to 388/7 at Lunch
