Facebook clarifies on data leak of 533 million users

Note: This article was first published on 8 Apr 2021.

Facebook has clarified in a blog post that the recent data leak was not due to a hacking of its systems. 

According to the social media company, malicious actors obtained the data of more than 530 million Facebook users by scraping it from the platform prior to September 2019. Apparently, malicious actors made use of an issue with Facebook's contact importer to obtain a limited set of data from users' profiles. Fortunately, the limited set of data does not include financial information, health information or passwords. 

Facebook emphasised that this specific issue no longer exists and it has teams working to detect and stop such malicious behaviours. 

Source: Facebook