According to Mashable, the dark web had personal information for 200,000 Facebook Marketplace members. Names, phone numbers, email addresses, and Facebook profiles are among the information exposed. Bleeping Computers initially reported the data leak, which was discovered on a dark web forum. According to the site, the data was hacked by someone known on Discord as “algoatson”. Meta has yet to reply officially to the news of the leak.
“In October 2023, a cyber criminal by the name of ‘algoatson’ on Discord, breached a contractor that manages cloud services for Facebook and stole its partial user database of 200,000 entries,” Bleeping Computers said in its report.
This is not the first time such a data breach has been revealed. According to Mashable, in 2021, facts of 530 million Facebook users were leaked in an internet community.
The data was first hacked in 2019, two years before it was discovered floating on the dark web. As a result, Meta was fined 265 million Euros for breaking the European Union’s GDPR, which safeguards user privacy.
The 2021 data breach also featured the phone numbers of three of Facebook’s founders: Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz.
How to Protect Your Facebook Data
The Office of the New York State Attorney General has provided a list of procedures to safeguard the security of your data. They are:
- Check your active Facebook sessions frequently to prevent unauthorized use of your account
- Review the conditions before running Facebook apps and games
- Be vague with basic profile information, such as your hometown, employer, birth date, and contact information. Set the audience for this information to Friends or Only Me
- Use the app-specific privacy controls
Aside from these fundamental procedures, users can update their accounts’ passwords and enable two-factor authentication as a second layer of verification.
