Your phone number is now being sold on Telegram ... More than 500 million phone numbers have been leaked on Facebook
Alon Gal, a security researcher, co-founder and chief technology officer at cybersecurity company Hudson Rock, discovered and reported a serious problem for millions of Facebook users, where, according to the researcher, a group of cybercriminals were selling phone numbers and identifiers from Vibock accounts. In Telegram with the help of the bot program.
The researcher reported this problem for the first time to Motherboard, which in turn contacted Facebook to find out more details, to which Facebook responded that the security flaw that allowed to take advantage of this vulnerability has been fixed since 2019.
Facebook confirmed to Motherboard that when using the bot on Telegram they did not find recent user data; However, both Alon Gal and Motherboard state that with the aforementioned robot, they were able to find the phone numbers and data of real users of the social network.
Although the vulnerability was fixed in 2019, users who registered their phone number on Facebook before Facebook fixed the vulnerability had their numbers exposed on Telegram, especially if we consider that the phone number does not usually change frequently, and that Facebook has worked hard on requesting these Data from all people who have Vibock on the social network, especially those who have activated 2-step verification.
Alon Gal stated that it is important for Facebook to notify its users of this privacy breach so that they are less likely to fall victim to various hacking attempts and social engineering.
In early 2020 a vulnerability that enabled seeing the phone number linked to every Facebook account was exploited, creating a database containing the information 533m users across all countries.
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) January 14, 2021
It was severely under-reported and today the database became much more worrisome 1/2 pic.twitter.com/ryQ5HuF1Cm
So far, neither Facebook, Alon Gal or Motherboard has mentioned whether this robot has been reported to Telegram for the company to disable it.