In a recent database leakage incident at Facebook, the company has lasted more than 267 million Facebook users who were seen leftover the Internet claimed the Britain based Tech Research company led by Bob Diachenko the Comparitech and Security Researcher. This database leakage has further exposed the basic details like Facebook user IDs with names and phone numbers, which resulted due to the illegal scraping operation or Facebook API abuse by criminals in Vietnam.
The term scraping is used to define a process wherein the automated bots instantly sift with large numbers of the web pages along with copying the data from everyone over the database. The information carried in the data can be used to carry out a large scale SMS spam and phishing campaigns among the threats over the end-users claimed the report on Thursday thus affecting the users from the US. Now, with this, we see the Social Media giant is investigating the issue.
Interestingly, the revelations has come into the fore when the social media giant was trying to regain the faith of its users and this mess has happened in terms of securing and protecting their data especially when the Cambridge Analytica scandal has badly hit their reputation. As per reports, half of the years of the Cambridge Analytica Scandal who were seen the first turned out to be public and the Federal Commission earlier this month has now come up with the current defunct British data analytics along with the consulting company, which has been engaged in several deceptive practices to fetch the personal info from the tens of millions of Facebook users for issues like the voter-profiling and targeting.
Since the news of the personal details of 267 million Facebook users came out in the light, Diachenko seemed to have informed the Internet-based service provider for managing the IP address of the server, which can further remove the access. But the data seemed to have posted the hacker forum as well for the downloading thing claimed the FB’s security researcher. It further said that the company IDs remain unique and the phone numbers linked to the same can be used to access the personal details of the users as well.
However, the way the cybercriminals were able to get away with the user IDS and phone numbers were leaked are still to be known, what is more, interesting to know is that it was leaked at the Facebook’s developer API, which is a place that remains the restricted access to phone numbers in 2018. The API of Facebook seems to be often used by the app developers for adding up the social context for their applications with the help of accessing the profile of the users along with the groups, friends lists, event data and photos. The phone numbers were seen available only to third-party developers before 2018. The cause of the leakage was the security hole that existed in Facebook’s API that helped the criminals to access the data.