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- About 500 million people now have their privacy stripped as their Facebook data has been recently leaked
- The firm is yet to acknowledge the breach as several people are still unaware of the situation
- Hackers could use stolen data to conduct sim-swapping and other operations, potentially leading to bad news, especially for crypto users
In recent times, Facebook has been accused of snooping on their user’s lives. However, in a somewhat unique situation, leaked Facebook data can now be used as a potential vessel to conduct nefarious cybercrime operations. About half a billion users’ data has been stolen, and many of them are still uninformed of the situation as Facebook is yet to acknowledge the breach.
Crypto traders at greatest risk
The issue came to light in the wee hours of April 4 when a security analyst named Alon Gal stumbled upon a conversation in a hacking forum. Alon, who is also the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of the Hudson Rock security firm, posted a tweet about this issue. The data compromised includes users’ corresponding Facebook ID, full names, complete location history, date of birth, email address, phone number, and bio. Even though the data breach affects a large section of the population, crypto users are the most vulnerable as hackers may potentially use this information to engineer targeted attacks and get access to their crypto wallets and private keys.
Security vulnerability exploited
This issue’s root cause can be traced to a vulnerability with the Facebook software initially discovered only in late 2019. By 2021, it was known that the exposure was massive enough for hackers to gain access not only to phone numbers but a user’s complete bio and meta-data. One majorly probable course of action for the hackers would now be to deploy a host of social-engineering attacks to steal user’s money. This is not unheard of as sim-swapping victims have sued companies earlier, such as T-Mobile, for a sum of $450,000. Kaspersky Labs also published a report in 2018 that hackers stole $43 million (21,000 ETH) over a year. The recent breach is significantly larger than the earlier Ledger breach, which consisted of 270,000 victims who could potentially sue the hardware wallet firm.
Facebook has not yet acknowledged the breach when writing this piece.
Steve Anderson is an Australian crypto enthusiast. He is a specialist in management and trading for over 5 years. Steve has worked as a crypto trader, he loves learning about decentralisation, understanding the true potential of the blockchain.
