Mark Zuckerberg's social network has slipped up again on issues relating to the privacy of its users . This is not a new issue, but rather a completely unprotected server that has now come to light.
The discovery was made by Sanyam Jain, a member of the internet security argentina phone number nonprofit GDI Foundation, who quickly informed TechCrunch of the server’s existence, which held more than 419 million user records from around the world, including 133 million Facebook user records in the United States, 18 million in the United Kingdom, and another with more than 50 million in Vietnam. Each record contained a unique Facebook ID for each user and the phone number associated with their account.
The trickiest part of the issue is that the server was not password protected , meaning anyone could have accessed it. It is worth noting that with someone else's phone number, an attacker can force a password reset on any Internet account associated with that number.
“This dataset is old and appears to contain information obtained before we made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers,” Facebook spokesperson Jay Nancarrow said. “The dataset has been deleted and we have seen no evidence that any Facebook accounts have been compromised.”
Facebook's fraudulent practices continue to be in the spotlight. This summer, the documentary " The Great Hack " was released on Netflix, detailing the Cambridge Analytica case , the largest data breach in history.