The privacy of millions who have a Facebook account was recently compromised when the company suffered a data breach that released the location, age, gender and phone numbers of some of its users. According to Techcrunch, over 419 million records were released online and 133 million of those records hold private Facebook information.
The hack put users at risk of spam calls and SIM-swapping that gives an attacker the chance to force-reset someone’s internet account based on the number connected to the network. A spokesperson from Facebook has responded to the hack claiming the data was removed before any serious damage could be done with the information.
“This data set is old and appears to have information obtained before we made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers,” Jay Nancarrow said. “The data set has been taken down and we have seen no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised.”
A similar situation took place back in April when Instagram was hacked, releasing the passwords for tens of thousands of users. Before the issue was fixed, Instagram issued a statement detailing how the passwords were not “internally abused or improperly accessed.”