(Business Insider) – Phone numbers linked to as many as 419 million Facebook accounts were recently found on an online server that was not protected by a password, according to a TechCrunch report on Wednesday. Facebook told Business Insider that there was no evidence that any users had their accounts compromised. On Thursday, the company said the data set contained duplicate entries and that the official number of exposed phone numbers totaled around 220 million. The database was brought to TechCrunch’s attention by a security researcher,
who discovered the information sitting in plaintext — meaning it wasn’t encrypted at all. This information appears to have been gathered by a third party, who left it exposed to the internet. The database was taken offline after the web host was contacted, TechCrunch said. The information in question, according to the report, included users’ Facebook IDs — which are strings of numbers used by the company to uniquely identify an account — and the associated phone number for each account. Some records are said to have included the user’s name, gender, and country in which they resided. READ MORE
