Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s phone number leaked online in massive data breach

In a large-scale user data breach of at least 533 million Facebook accounts on Saturday, hackers also reportedly leaked the personal cell phone number of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and made it easily accessible to the public. The confidential information was compromised back in January. Security breachers created a huge database of stolen phone numbers linked to the Facebook accounts and posted it to ‘Hackers’ forum’, which could be easily passed on to anyone with basic computing skills, a Bloomberg report confirmed. 

“Regarding the Facebook leak of the 533M people– the irony is that Mark Zuckerberg is regrettably included in the leak as well. If journalists are struggling to get a statement from Facebook, maybe just give him a call, from the tel in the leak?” a data security Dave Walker tweeted Sunday. Reports claimed that the hackers were providing the sensitive information of Facebook Inc data such as the phone number virtually “for free”. It was also found that confidential information has been circulating on the hacker's forum since January. 

6 million users info hacked from India

The exposed data includes 533 million impacted Facebook users from at least 106 countries. As many as 32 million records were leaked from the US alone, and nearly 11 million from the UK, and 6 million users' data was leaked from India. This confidential information, in some instances, included other details such as the location, full names, birth dates, complete bio, Facebook IDs, and even the email addresses of the Facebook users.

A Facebook spokesperson, in a statement to Insider, said that the data was dumped by Facebook Inc. in 2019 due to a vulnerability patch and was a couple of years old. However,  the CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock Alon Gal who first identified the breach reportedly said that the data st9ill provided valuable customer information to the cybercriminals. Meanwhile, Facebook dismissed the severity of the leak saying that the data was very old, it however could be utilized by the bad actors to commit identity theft or fraud. 

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