Another data leak from Facebook: Millions of users from Vietnam are victims. The personal data of 12 million Facebook accounts turns out to be shared on a server. The leaked personal data includes information such as name, birthplace, GPS coordinates, Facebook usernames and IDs.
In the past few years, Facebook has survived a number of problems, from the social media platform’s hegemony on the internet to scandals like Cambridge Analytica. In addition, vulnerabilities and privacy issues continue to hurt the company. A few weeks ago, a hacker was caught selling 267 million Facebook users’ personal data.
Although the company claims that it has taken measures to combat these problems, similar problems continue to occur. Finally, the research team of Safety Detectives revealed another leak, 12 million Facebook users from Vietnam have their personal data leaked on the internet. According to the researchers, the data was found on the Elasticsearch server, and also contains records from the breach of Vietnamese users’ data from last January.
There are other data sources in the leaked data
It is thought that not all data is from Facebook and multiple sources are in the game. Details on how perpetrators have captured data of this size are also unknown. The leaked data is over 3GB are mostly includes personally identifyable information (PII). These data includes:
Name, surname
Place of birth
Location
Education information
Date of birth
GPS coordinates
Email addresses
Facebook usernames and IDs
Profile points
Family relationships with other Facebook users
All of this shows that attackers can blackmail victims with personal data, organize complex phishing attacks supported by social engineering, and spam users with marketing and malicious messages. Worse still, attackers using GPS data can compromise users’ physical security.
The server with the leak was shut down by Facebook. However, the company’s data security vulnerabilities continue to create question marks. On the other hand, it is thought that users should limit the personal information they give to social media platforms such as Facebook. Although Facebook has taken some precautions regarding data breaches, the problems continue.
