Facebook says hackers ´scraped´ data of 533m users in 2019 leak

THE NEWS International

San Francisco: Facebook said Tuesday that hackers "scraped" 

personal data of some half-billion users back in 2019 by taking 

advantage of a feature designed to help people easily find friends 

using contact lists.

A trove of information about more than 530 million Facebook users 

was shared over the weekend at a hacker forum, prompting the 

leading social network to explain what happened and call on people 

to be vigilant about privacy settings.

"It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019," Facebook product management director Mike Clark said in a post.

"This is another example of the ongoing, adversarial relationship technology companies have with fraudsters who intentionally break platform policies to scrape internet services."

The data included phone numbers, birth dates, and email addresses, and some of the data appeared to be current, according to US media reports.

The stolen data did not include passwords or financial data, according to Facebook.

Scraping is a tactic that involves using automated software to gather up information shared publicly online.

"All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free," Alon Gal, chief technology officer at the Hudson Rock... Click to continue