(WHDH) — Nearly 300 million Facebook user IDs, phone numbers, and names have been exposed in a massive data breach, according to a new report.
The private information was likely exposed as the “result of an illegal scraping operation or Facebook API abuse by criminals in Vietnam,” evidence uncovered by Comparitech and security researcher Bob Diachenko indicates.
Information contained in a database of more than 267 million Facebook users may have been collected to be used in a large SMS spam and phishing campaign, Comparitech reported.
Diachenko said he believes the data may have also been posted on a hacker forum as a download and that the information was exposed from Dec. 4 to Dec. 19.
Most of the exposed users were said to be from the United States.
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