533 million Facebook user data was leaked and traded illegally by the hacker. Data such as user identity and cellphone numbers are sold using bots in the Telegram application.

This data leak was revealed by Alon Gal, Chief Technical Officer at cybersecurity company, Hudzon Rock.

According to him, this is the impact of the data leak on Facebook in 2019. Hackers take advantage of bots on Telegram that allow someone to find out the Facebook user ID, just by entering the cellphone user number.

This bot can work the other way around. If the ID is known, the bot will look for the user’s phone number.

In early 2020 a vulnerability that enabled seeing the phone number linked to every Facebook account was exploited, creating a database containing the information 533m users across all countries.

It was severely under-reported and today the database became much more worrisome 1/2 pic.twitter.com/ryQ5HuF1Cm

— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) January 14, 2021

To access the data, you only need one credit, which is sold for the US $ 20. If you buy in large quantities, 1,000 credits are sold for around $ 20000.

Reporting from Motherboard, this bot has obtained data from dozens of countries, including Indonesia with a leak of 130,331 users.

Few days ago a user created a Telegram bot allowing users to query the database for a low fee, enabling people to find the phone numbers linked to a very large portion of Facebook accounts.

This obviously has a huge impact on privacy. pic.twitter.com/lM1omndDET

— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) January 14, 2021

Although the leaked cellphone numbers come from Facebook data in 2019, it is possible that the user has not changed their number since 2019 until now.

It is not known whether the bot has been removed by Telegram or not. However, unfortunately, even though the bot has been deleted, hackers can still access its data.

Full list of affected users by country pic.twitter.com/Wrrzd0WyxE

— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) January 14, 2021

Facebook on iOS failed. iPhone users see “Session Expired”. The app then asks you to log in again.

Facebook had a slip-up that night. The iOS app has some bug that caused iPhone users to log out. You see the message “session has expired”, which you can find below. They are then asked to log in again. What is it caused by?

It’s hard to say where this error is due. Perhaps it lies on the servers of a popular social networking site. The problem can be quickly fixed because on the next screen you only have to touch the avatar icon and Facebook logs the user in again. However, some people who have an iOS app and use two-factor authentication report that they have trouble signing in again.

Error “session expired” only in the iOS Facebook app for iPhones

This issue only affects iPhone applications. Facebook on Android devices does not display such an error. The company acknowledged these inconveniences and said in a statement that it is working to restore the software to normal operation. Most likely, this error was caused by a configuration change, but the exact cause was not given.

Amidst the busy conversation of people regarding WhatsApp’s new policy which makes users obliged to share their data with Facebook, a problem has emerged that can be considered quite serious and concerns the privacy of WhatsApp users.

Because it is known that currently a number of WhatsApp users’ phone numbers can actually be found through the Google Search search engine service. This was revealed by a security researcher named Rajshekhar Rajaharia.

Through his Twitter account, Rajaharia said that he had found various WhatsApp phone numbers just by typing a special keyword on the Google Search search page.

It is known that the phone numbers that appear are mostly WhatsApp users who have already used WhatsApp Web or Desktop.

15 Jan 2021, If you are using @WhatsApp Web, your Mobile Number and Messages are being index by @Google again. Don't know why WhatsApp is still not monitoring their website and google. This is 3rd time.#Infosec #Privacy #infosecurity #GDPR #Whatsapp #Privacy #Policy #Google pic.twitter.com/D6o1emxDgv

— Rajshekhar Rajaharia (@rajaharia) January 15, 2021

“January 15, 2021, If ​​you use WhatsApp Web, your phone number will be indexed on Google again. It is not known why WhatsApp still does not monitor their website as well as Google,” wrote Rajaharia via his personal Twitter account.

Rajaharia also found a file called Robots.txt which WhatsApp created deliberately to avoid users’ phone numbers from being indexed by Google. However, it didn’t work at all.

It was also stated that this is the third time similar problems have occurred with WhatsApp. It is still unclear whether this was an error from WhatsApp or Google ignoring the Robots.txt file that WhatsApp created.