Dikhyaa Mohanty 
Facebook has come under new trouble as phone numbers of 533 million users are being sold via a bot on Telegram, which came from a Facebook vulnerability patched by the social network in 2019.
Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of cybersecurity
firm Hudson Rock first alerted about the Telegram bot selling Facebook users’ information. He said that this is a very difficult to watch a database of that size being sold in cybercrime communities, it harms our privacy severely and will certainly be used for smishing and other fraudulent activities by bad actors.
Although data is a bit old, it still presents a cybersecurity and privacy risk to those whose phone numbers may be exposed. Facebook informed Motherboard that the data relates to a vulnerability the company fixed in August 2019″.The Telegram bot lets users enter either a phone number to receive their Facebook ID or visa versa.
The bot claims to contain information on Facebook users from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and 15 other countries but the Telegram bot has been running since January 12.
In December last year, reports surfaced that a bug exposed the personal information like email addresses and Instagram users’ birthdays.
A Facebook spokesperson stated that the researcher reported an issue where, if someone was a part of a small test we
ran in October for business accounts, personal information of the person they were messaging could have been revealed
In November, Facebook fixed a critical bug in its Messenger app that could have allowed hackers to connect audio calls without the app user’s knowledge or approval.
News Source – IANS
Image Source- Google
