San Francisco (AFP)
Facebook was investigating a potential data breach by 267 million of its users on Thursday, revealed by a cybersecurity researcher who found it exposed on hacker forums.
"We are looking at this problem, but we believe that this is information obtained before the changes made in recent years to better protect people's data," a Facebook spokesperson told AFP.
According to researcher Bob Diachenko and the Comparitech site, the identifiers, telephone numbers and names of 267 million users, mainly American, were freely available on the "dark web" - enough to carry out vast spam operations and phishing.
The database, put online on a hackers (pirates) forum a week ago, was no longer accessible on Thursday following the alert given by Bob Diachenko, according to Comparitech. The researcher believes that this data was recovered by "criminals in Vietnam", thanks to a system of automated robots which copy all the data to which they manage to access.
In September, phone numbers linked to more than 400 million Facebook accounts were stored online, at the mercy of malicious use, according to the American site TechCrunch.
Facebook had partially confirmed this information, ensuring that according to its checks the number of accounts concerned was only about half of the 419 million mentioned.
© 2019 AFP