The personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users has been found on a low-level hacking website.
The data posted, first reported by Business Insider, includes phone numbers, full names, locations, dates of birth and email addresses of 533 million users.
The information consists of people from more than 100 countries, including 32 million user records in the US, 11 million users in the UK, and 6 million users in India.
Insider reported that it verified the data by matching the numbers of Facebook users from their page with the dataset.
According to the news outlet, the data is said to be several years old.
A spokesperson for the social media platform said the information was scraped after a vulnerability was patched to the site in 2019.
The Hill has contacted Facebook for comment.
The latest data disclosure is the latest example of the challenges facing the social media company with regard to user data and privacy.
In 2018, the platform dropped a feature that allowed users to search for ‘friends’ using their personal phone numbers after discovering that Cambridge Analytica had access to that information.
According to a report by The Associated Press, nearly 87 million Facebook users were compromised at the time.
A Ukrainian security researcher found a similar database of phone numbers and unique user IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users in 2019. Most of those users were based in the US, AP reported.
It is currently unclear whether that database is related to the most recent findings.
“This is old data reported earlier in 2019,” Facebook told AP. “We found and resolved this issue in August 2019.”