With someone else’s phone number, an attacker can force-reset the password on any internet account associated with that number. This latest incident exposed millions of users’ phone numbers just from their Facebook IDs, putting them at risk of spam calls and SIM-swapping attacks, which relies on tricking cell carriers into giving a person’s phone number to an attacker. Since then the company has seen several high-profile scraping incidents, including at Instagram, which recently admitted to having profile data scraped in bulk. This is the latest security lapse involving Facebook data after a string of incidents since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw more than 80 million profiles scraped to help identify swing voters in the 2016 U.S. The “44” indicates +44, the U.K.’s country code and the “7” indicates a cell phone number. Some of the records also had the user’s name, gender and location by country.Ī redacted set of records from the U.K. We also checked other records by matching phone numbers against Facebook’s own password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user’s phone number linked to their account. TechCrunch verified a number of records in the database by matching a known Facebook user’s phone number against their listed Facebook ID. A user’s Facebook ID is typically a long, unique and public number associated with their account, which can be easily used to discern an account’s username.īut phone numbers have not been public in more than a year since Facebook restricted access to users’ phone numbers. The exposed server contained more than 419 million records over several databases on users across geographies, including 133 million records on U.S.-based Facebook users, 18 million records of users in the U.K., and another with more than 50 million records on users in Vietnam.īut because the server wasn’t protected with a password, anyone could find and access the database.Įach record contained a user’s unique Facebook ID and the phone number listed on the account. Hundreds of millions of phone numbers linked to Facebook accounts have been found online.
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