Report: 267 million Facebook users IDs and phone numbers exposed online
Found on Comparitech on Sunday, 22 December 2019
Comparitech partnered with security researcher Bob Diachenko to uncover the Elasticsearch cluster. Diachenko believes the trove of data is most likely the result of an illegal scraping operation or Facebook API abuse by criminals in Vietnam, according to the evidence.
Facebook’s API is used by app developers to add social context to their applications by accessing users’ profiles, friends list, groups, photos, and event data.
While you may blame the criminals behind it, the main problem is that Facebook collects all this data and offers it to everybody who gets a developer account. So your information is practically available for everybody.