INTERNATIONAL DRAFTING.- Facebook revealed on Tuesday the possible cause of the leakage of personal data from more than 530 million accounts. The data in question was obtained from company accounts by “malicious actors” through ‘web scraping’, using the social network’s contact importer before September 2019. “This function was designed to help people find easily your friends to connect with our services using their contact lists, “the company detailed in a statement.

This information was given after several cybersecurity experts advised last weekend that the information of the users of the social network, which includes full names, phone numbers, Facebook ID, locations, email addresses, among others, it was posted for free online.

As explained by the company, the data in question was obtained from Facebook accounts by “malicious actors” through ‘web scraping’, using the social network’s contact importer before September 2019. “This function was designed to help people easily find their friends to connect with our services using their contact lists, “the company detailed in a statement.

So you can find out if your Facebook account is among the 533 million that were exposed

The platform claimed that upon realizing how hackers were using the tool, it immediately made changes to the contact importer. “In this case, we updated it to prevent malicious actors from using ‘software’ to mimic our ‘app’ and uploading a large set of phone numbers to see which ones matched Facebook users,” he said, explaining that, to Through the function, hackers could query a set of user accounts and obtain some data about them. “The information did not include financial data, health or passwords,” he stressed.

“It is important to understand that the malicious actors obtained this data not through ‘hacking’ our systems, but extracting them from our platform before September 2019 ″, he concluded.

The leak affects users of more than 100 countries, including more than 32 million Internet user records in the US, 13 million in Mexico, almost 11 in Spain, 8 in Brazil, the same number in Peru and almost 7 million in Chile.

.

Categorized in:

Tagged in:

,