Data of more than 500 million Facebook accounts posted online: Reports

Data of more than 500 million Facebook users has been posted online. The data from these accounts was originally leaked in 2019.

Sensitive information such as email address, name, phone number, anniversaries and birthdays, relationship status and more has now been posted on an online hackers forum, a cybercrime expert and several media reports claimed.

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"All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free," Alon Gal, chief technology officer at the Hudson Rock cybercrime intelligence firm, said Saturday on Twitter.

It has also been claimed that some of the leaked information is current, meaning the users are still using the same phone numbers etc.

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"This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked," Gal claimed.

However, Facebook has denied this, claiming the issue was fixed in 2019 itself.

"This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019," Facebook's spokesperson was quoted by AFP. "We found and fixed this issue in August 2019."

Gal, on the other hand, claims nearly 32 million American accounts and 20 million French accounts were up for sale in January.

"Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking and marketing," he tweeted.