Over 9,000 Kingston residents have had their data compromised by a Facebook leak, YGK News has learned. The news comes as Business Insider reports that the personal information of millions were found on a hacking forum, free of charge.
The firm Hudson Rock calculated that almost 3.5 million Canadians were affected by the hack, 9,000 of which were located in Kingston, Ontario. Worldwide, 533 million Facebook users were affected by the data leak.
“All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free,” he wrote in a tweet. “This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for that account was leaked.”
The information includes personal names, phone numbers, occupations, residence, email addresses and birthdates. The information is sold for lead generation services, phishing schemes and is used to facilitate scams.
In a statement on their platform, product management director Mike Clark has downplayed the leak, stating that the information was collected through scrapping prior to 2019.
“It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019,” said product management director Mike Clark.
Clark also says that this is the fault of fraudsters.
“It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019,” said product management director Mike Clark.
Services have appeared online that help users identify whether they’ve been affected by the Facebook breach. One of these are called “haveibeenzucked,” a website that lets you search through the leaked database and identify whether your data has been compromised.