cross pond high tech

The data includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses.

• The personal data of over 500 million Facebook users was posted in a low-level hacking forum.
• It includes phone numbers, full names, locations, email addresses, and biographical information.
• Security researchers say hackers could use the data to impersonate people and commit fraud.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

 

A user in a low-level hacking forum on Saturday published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free.

 

The exposed data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses.

 

Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified several records by matching known Facebook users' phone numbers with the IDs listed in the data set. We also verified records by testing email addresses from the data set in Facebook's password-reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user's phone number.

 

A Facebook spokesperson told Insider that the data had been scraped because of a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019.

 

While it's a couple of years old, the leaked data could prove valuable to cybercriminals who use people's personal information to impersonate them or scam them into handing over login credentials, according to Alon Gal, the chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who discovered the trough of leaked data on Saturday.

 

"A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook's users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social-engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts," Gal told Insider.

Gal discovered the leaked data in January when a user in the same hacking forum advertised an automated bot that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a price. Motherboard reported on that bot's existence at the time and verified that the data was legitimate.

 

Now the data set has been posted on the hacking forum for free, making it available to anyone with rudimentary data skills.

Insider attempted to reach the leaker through the messaging app Telegram but did not get a response.

 

This is not the first time that lots of Facebook users' phone numbers have been found exposed online. The vulnerability uncovered in 2019 allowed millions of phone numbers to be scraped from Facebook's servers in violation of its terms of service. Facebook said that vulnerability was patched in August 2019.

 

Facebook vowed to crack down on mass data-scraping after Cambridge Analytica scraped the data of over 80 million users in violation of Facebook's terms of service to target voters with political ads in the 2016 election.

 

Gal said that from a security standpoint there wasn't much Facebook could do to help users affected by the breach since their data is already out in the open, but he added that Facebook could notify users so they could remain vigilant about phishing schemes or fraud using their data.

 

"Individuals signing up to a reputable company like Facebook are trusting them with their data, and Facebook [is] supposed to treat the data with utmost respect," Gal said. "Users having their personal information leaked is a huge breach of trust and should be handled accordingly."

More than 200 manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and U.S.-listed electric vehicle start-up NIO, transmit position information and dozens of other data points to government-backed monitoring centers, The Associated Press has found. Generally, it happens without car owners’ knowledge.

 

The automakers say they are merely complying with local laws, which apply only to alternative energy vehicles. Chinese officials say the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs.

 

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According to national specifications published in 2016, electric vehicles in China transmit data from the car’s sensors back to the manufacturer. From there, automakers send at least 61 data points, including location and details about battery and engine function to local centers like the one Ding oversees in Shanghai.

Data also flows to a national monitoring center for new energy vehicles run by the Beijing Institute of Technology, which pulls information from more than 1.1 million vehicles across the country, according to the National Big Data Alliance of New Energy Vehicles. The national monitoring center declined to respond to questions.

Those numbers are about to get much bigger. Though electric vehicle sales accounted for just 2.6 percent of the total last year, policymakers have said they’d like new energy vehicles to account for 20 percent of total sales by 2025. Starting next year, all automakers in China must meet production minimums for new energy vehicles, part of Beijing’s aggressive effort to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources and place itself at the forefront of a growing global industry.

 

the Fortune 500 is turning over at a faster and faster rate over time and here are some insights on the phenomenon 

Mankind "weighs" 300 million tons. It produced so far 1.1 "anthropogenic" teratons. Global human-made mass now exceeds all living biomass.

This recent "paper" in Nature sheds some light on how to define, evaluate, and make sense of non commensurable data.

Over the last seven years, France’s Banque publique d’investissement, or Bpifrance, has been the world’s most active sovereign wealth fund investing in private tech companies. Bpifrance was originally set up as a sovereign investment fund in 2009.

The government of Singapore owns the world’s second and third most active funds. These two funds are Temasek Holdings, which distributes dividends solely to Singapore’s Ministry of Finance, and GIC, the private equity investment arm of the government of Singapore Investment Corporation.

It's not just that modern smartphones are gobbling up tons of data. Another part of their challenge to wireless networks is that they are constantly pinging the network.

A less talked-about issue is the fact that many smartphone apps are constantly pinging the network, like a kid asking his or her parents every few seconds, “Are we there yet?”

Only smartphone apps are even more annoying. Some ping the network as often as 2,400 times an hour. The result is network congestion and signal loss, as well as a far more rapid drain on battery life.

“Wireless signaling is a tricky topic because oftentimes it’s hidden, happening in the background without any user knowledge. But it’s growing bigger by the minute, as more users download more connected applications” said Isabelle Dumont, head of marketing at Seven Networks, which pitches a solution to help reduce the issue.

If current trends continue, the constant pinging of the network could eventually amount to 25 trillion signaling events per hour, Seven says.