Personal data of 200,000 users of Facebook Marketplace was found on the dark web, according to a report in Mashable. The leaked data includes names, phone numbers, email addresses and Facebook profile information. The news about data leak was first reported by Bleeping Computers, which said that it was found on a dark web forum. The data was hacked by someone who goes by "algoatson" on Discord, the outlet further said. Meta has so far not officially responded 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 that such a data leak has been reported. In 2021, details of 530 million Facebook users were leaked in an online forum, as per Mashable.
The data was originally hacked in 2019, two years before it was finally found floating in the dark web. As a result, Meta was fined 265 million Euros for violating the European Union's GDPR, which protects user privacy.
The 2021 data leak also included the phone numbers for 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 listed some of the steps to ensure your data remains safe. These are:
- Check your active Facebook sessions frequently to prevent unauthorised 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
Apart from these basic steps, users can also change the passwords of their accounts and turn on two-factor authentication as a second layer of verification.
