Facebook data breach exposes personal information of 533 million users, including its founder Mark Zuckerberg

A massive data breach has exposed the personal information of 533 million Facebook users – including its boss Mark Zuckerberg.

Tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is among 533 million Facebook users who have had their personal information leaked online following a massive data breach at the social media giant.

The dump of data, discovered overnight, includes a range of details of users impacted, including telephone numbers, including that of the platform’s founder and chief executive officer.

Mr Zuckerberg‘s information, including his location, date of birth, phone number and Facebook user ID, was among stolen data published on a hacker forum.

Cyber researcher Dave Walker also confirmed Facebook Inc co-founders Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz had their personal details included in the dumped data.

Business Insider reports the data includes over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India.

All up, users from some 106 countries were impacted by the breach.

As well as phone numbers, the data also includes Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdays and bios – and even email addresses.

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The mammoth data breach has exposed 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries. Picture: AFP

Alon Gal, the co-founder of Israeli cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who discovered the trove of data on Saturday, said the details that were leaked are a couple of years old.

Mr Gal said the database appears to be the same set of Facebook-linked telephone numbers that he had discovered circulating in hacker circles since January.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the data was scraped due to a vulnerability that the company patched back in 2019.

The existence of the information – which was being distributed by a bot for a price – was first reported by tech publication Motherboard.

But now the entire dataset has been made free – meaning it is available for anyone with basic hacking and data scraping skills to plunder.

Despite not being current, the information could be used to cybercriminals to impersonate people or scam them into handing over login credentials.

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A sharp rise in social engineering attacks is expected in the wake of the data dump. Picture: AFP

“A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook‘s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks (or) hacking attempts,” Mr Gal told Business Insider.

The information is being offered for a few dollars’ worth of digital credit on a well-known site for low-level hackers.

Mr Gal said he had verified the authenticity of at least some of the data by comparing it against phone numbers of people he knew.

Other journalists say they have also been able to match known phone numbers to the details in the data dump.

Mr Gal told Reuters that Facebook users should be alert to “social engineering attacks” in the coming months by people who may have obtained their phone numbers or other private data.

This story originally appeared in The Sun and is reproduced here with permission