Facebook, data of 35 million Italians were stolen: it was posted on the Internet – Corriere.it

I phone numbers And in some cases name and surnameAnd date of Birth e Email address From around 35 million Italians Facebook subscribers trade on the network for free after publishing them on the hacker site. This data is part of a larger database of 533 million profiles from over a hundred countries: Italy is among the hardest hit, With the number of stakeholders corresponds to almost all users of the social network (in the US there are 32 million and in the UK there are 11).

To report the news, last Saturday, security expert Alon Gal and the site Interested in the trade. Contact other experts Courier service They confirmed the validity of the data that they were able to refer to, which dates back to 2019.

Why is he talking now? In fact, because we’re talking about it again: A robbery with the same characteristics has been known since at least last January, When it was possible in the Telegram messaging app to query a robot to obtain, for a fee, the phone number of a Facebook user whose identity code (Facebook ID) was known, and vice versa.

After the new discoveries, the giant Menlo Park itself was announcing the “data and problem identified and solved in 2019”: a loophole that allowed anyone able to create custom software for mining the social network (Scraping It is the technical term) for the number of members that may have been entered during registration or for security reasons.

The news now is that The database is freely available and “accessible to anyone with basic technical knowledge. This is not a small problem and it confirms the amount of information these platforms have and how difficult it is to keep them under control, ”explains cybersecurity expert Ricardo Megeato. The biggest risk, he continues, is linked to the intersection of the different databases available to the bad guys: “Let’s take Italy, where the Ho.mobile operator has been hit in recent months: by combining data, that stolen from Facebook she can also add his home address.”

Don’t panic, but it is only right that you are aware of what has happened and take small but substantial precautions. On site haveibeenpwned.com You can check if your email is in the database (and even if passwords aren’t included at this time, it’s a good idea to change them). Meggiato recommends, if possible, with an The phone number associated with Facebook is no longer used for two-way scans (When we send an SMS to change the password), on that and other portals, because people who have more information about our identity may try to clone it. The same goes for phishing: Those who know something about us or are using birthdate to target older adults less familiar with the internet can try to organize disguised scams and make or prompt us to click on malicious links with references to interests, dates, or known places of the victim. So be careful.

Although the loophole was before the European Regulation on Personal Data Protection in GDP went into effect, in 2019 Facebook contacted the Irish Data Protection Authority, which is now checking whether the data is actually the same two years ago. Internal sources for the Italian sponsor say so The authority works to reduce risks.