If your Facebook data got leaked today, it's your own damn fault

You've been warned dozens of times in the past decade.

News broke in the past few hours that the personal data of some 533 million Facebook users got leaked online. Any cybercriminal in the world can just grab all the data and use it for identity theft, social engineering attacks, spamming and much more. 

The leak was discovered today by Alon Gal, the CTO of Hudson Rock. 

Alon Gal (Under the Breach) @UnderTheBreach

All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked. I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data.

Alon Gal (Under the Breach) @UnderTheBreach

In early 2020 a vulnerability that enabled seeing the phone number linked to every Facebook account was exploited, creating a database containing the information 533m users across all countries. It was severely under-reported and today the database became much more worrisome 1/2 https://t.co/ryQ5HuF1Cm

The data includes full names directly associated with phone numbers, Facebook IDs, location data, birth dates, bios and in some cases email addresses.

Facebook hastened to point out that the leaked data was actually stolen in August of 2019 via a vulnerability Facebook fixed during that same month. The news today is that the data from that breach was posted online.

If your data was leaked, I'm sorry to say, it's your fault. 

You have been warned again and again and again that Facebook doesn't care about your privacy or security. 

Massive leaks like this happened twice in 2018 and five time — FIVE TIMES — in 2019. It's happened even this year. 

The company has been caught allowing other organizations and apps to scrape and download and steal user data. 

In many cases, Facebook is warned well in advance about the vulnerabilities that enable the theft of user personal data and they do nothing about it. 

The company has been fined and sued by governments around the world, and in each case they do the bare minimum, pay the fine and move on with security vulnerabilities that enable leaks like the one that happened yet again today. 

Using Facebook is like using the password "password" for your bank account, or leaving the front door to your house open when you go away for a month long vacation. 

To use Facebook is to knowingly offer up your personal details to the world's cybercriminals, because hacks and leaks like this are inevitable and certain.