your phone number is for sale!
It’s complicated at the moment at Facebook, as at WhatsApp. While a particularly dangerous malware is currently raging on WhatsApp, the father of social networks has to deal with a rather significant data leak. As explained by our colleagues at Motherboard, the high-tech branch of Vice, computer security researcher Alon Gal discovered that a Telegram bot is currently selling 533 million phone numbers owned by Facebook users.
Each issue is offered at $ 20 each, and by buying it the bot offers you to find the associated Facebook account. Everything is automated and pretty well thought out. To get these numbers, you must first buy credits (one dollar = one credit). If the customer is greedy, he can benefit from a discount on a large amount of data. Fact, the purchase of 10,000 credits is charged half price at $ 5,000 instead of $ 10,000.
According to the hacker behind this sale, he obtained these hundreds of millions of phone numbers thanks to an old Facebook security flaw, corrected in August 2019. Indeed, we remember these 600 million passwords and numbers left in the clear on a Facebook server.
Full list of affected users by country pic.twitter.com/Wrrzd0WyxE
– Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) January 14, 2021
19 million numbers of French users affected
In April 2020, the social network was the victim of a similar leak, with 267 million hacked accounts that ended up on the Darknet. According to the hacker, this gigantic database that he managed to get hold of contains the numbers of North American, Canadian, British, Australian, French and fifteen other countries. Regarding France, it is all the same 19 848 559 affected user numbers.
” It is very disturbing to see a database of this size being sold into cybercriminal communities, it seriously invades our privacy and will certainly be used for smishing and other fraudulent activity.s ”, laments Alon Gal. With these hundreds of millions, groups of hackers could launch major SMS phishing campaigns. At this time, it is not yet known whether Motherboard or computer security researchers have contacted Telegram to inform them of their discovery. However, it is to be hoped that the instant messaging application will do what is necessary as soon as possible to close this particularly dangerous sale.
Our advice to avoid this kind of disappointment …
If you don’t want your data to be sold on the Internet, ditch Facebook, WhatsApp and Gmail! Switch to Signal or Telegram and opt for ProtonMail to encrypt your emails (free up to 500MB of storage or 5 € / month unlimited). VPNs are also popular right now. These services which make it possible to encrypt all the data of your connection are more and more accessible: CyberGhost is one of the easiest to use with a price of only 2 € / month.
Source: Vice
