Bad trouble at home Facebook. A patrol of hackers has penetrated the barriers of the social network and has stolen the personal data of an ocean of users: even 267 million people. The news was released on his blog by security firm Comparitech, which found the database of data on a hacker forum, where it was freely downloadable by anyone, without any password. The file – remained online from 4 to 19 December – didn't include red code information like credit card numbers or home addresses, but IDs, names and phone numbers. A very serious violation, however, which casts yet another shadow on Facebook's ability to protect the personal data entrusted to it every day by over two billion subscribers.
"We are looking into this issue," a Facebook spokesperson told the agency France Press – but we believe that this information is most likely obtained before the changes we've made in recent years to better protect people's information."
According to Comparitech, the data may have been stolen from the application developers linked platform, or through the so-called website scraping, an illegal practice that allows you to extract data from a site using software designed for this purpose.
It is not the first time that the data of millions of Facebook users has been disseminated on the net. Besides the great Cambridge Analytica scandal, last September a researcher discovered an even larger database than the one reported by Comparitech, which contained the data of 419 million accounts. In addition, personal information about 29 million other users was revealed a year ago, while a programming error exposed 540 million Facebook data points.
