Personal information belonging to more than 267 million Facebook users has been exposed in an unsecured database on the dark web, it has emerged.
The Facebook IDs, phone numbers and full names of 267,140,436 users, most residing in the US, were discovered in the database by cybersecurity firm Comparitech and researcher Bob Diachenko, according to a report published Thursday.
The report warned that people identified in the database could be targeted by spam messages or phishing schemes.
Although it is not yet clear how the sensitive information was exposed, Diachenko traced the database back to Vietnam and speculated that it may have been compiled through an illegal process called ‘scraping’ – where automated bots copy public information from Facebook profiles – or stolen directly from Facebook’s developer API.