Homework 3 - Data Breach Analysis

Kai Marshall
CyberCrime
Nov 30, 2021

During my investigation involving the cyber attacks that occurred on numerous

businesses around the country, I noticed that FaceBook had an obscure high amount of

data attacks. On the site, FaceBook was reaching over 500 million attacks and was

highlighted in orange which could mean that the attacks are continuing to happen as I

write this essay. “A user in a low-level hacking forum on Saturday published the phone

numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free.” This

hacker exposed multiple people and their private information including the “personal

information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32

million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users

in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations,

birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses.”

How do we know this is true? Well an inspector put two and two together

comparing the leaked information to facebook users across the world. Although the data

was eventually scrapped because of FaceBook Vulnerability the company patched.

xEven though it's been scrapped, the amount of leaked data could be dangerous in the

hands of cyber criminals who use people's personal information to impersonate them or

scam them into handing over login credentials.

Although this is not the first time FaceBook has run into this problem. In 2019

FaceBook ran through a similar problem involving the loss of millions of phone numbers

that were scrapped in the process due to the violation of their terms. “From a security

standpoint there wasn't much Facebook could do to help users affected by the breach

since their data is already out in the open, but he added that Facebook would notify

users so they could remain vigilant about phishing schemes or fraud using their data.