Another massive Facebook data leak could be right around the corner

A 2019 Facebook data breach came back to haunt the company and affected users a few weeks ago when the data that hackers scraped from the site from more than 533 million accounts resurfaced online. Facebook dealt with the situation awfully, saying that the security issue was patched when the data breach was first discovered and that it won’t even notify impacted users. One of those users turned out to be Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Researchers used his data to prove his phone number is associated with an existing Signal account, a chat app that competes against WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This showed how personal data could be used to target victims. There is little that Facebook users can do to fix the issue, as the circulating database can’t be deleted. They can try to figure out whether their data is included in the hack. Changing the phone number associated with their identity in the database is also an option.

The second hack was more limited in scope. There’s a tool that allows people to find out the phone numbers of Facebook users who “liked” a page on a social network. The hack is unrelated to the database leak that impacted hundreds of millions of accounts.

A new report now indicates that a third data leak might be looming, and it could be of the same variety as the 2019 security issue. Attackers might be able to scrape emails belonging to millions of Facebook users directly from the service.