This should keep services that report exposed Personally Identifiable Information to consumers busy. If you’re a Facebook user and you don’t get notified of a compromise from your monitoring agency, maybe investigate what it is they do?
It would be nice to think that call centers match existing customers against the compromised data to increase security on compromised accounts, but how would we know:
“Personal information on more than 500 million Facebook users — previously leaked and now made more widely available — was shared online Saturday, according to the news site Insider, worrying experts who said the compromised data could make people more vulnerable to fraud.
Insider said it reviewed a sample of the leaked phone numbers, birth dates, biographical details and more and found that some data matched known Facebook users’ records. The Washington Post has not independently verified the information. Facebook said the leak involved “old” data stemming from a problem resolved in 2019, but the news still sparked renewed scrutiny of a social media giant previously dogged by high-profile concerns about data privacy.
“Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking and marketing,” tweeted Alon Gal, the co-founder of an Israeli cybercrime intelligence company called Hudson Rock, who flagged the release of the Facebook data Saturday. Social engineering involves getting access to people’s confidential information by gaining their trust rather than overcoming technical barriers — for example, by impersonating a tech support person.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
