309 million phone numbers and details of Facebook users exposed online, says report

It seems like social media company Facebook is in trouble for leaking users’ data yet again, if the reports are to be believed. A report by IT security firm Naked Security (Sophos) claims that phone numbers of close to 309 million Facebook users have leaked online. The report is based upon the findings of Cyble, another cybersecurity firm and Bob Diachenko, a security researcher.
As per the report, Cyble uncovered a database with 267 million Facebook profiles, all up for sale on the Dark Web. The firm bought the profiles itself ( for verification purposes) for a total of £500 (around $540) which amounts to about 0.0002 cents per record. The records contained the Facebook user IDs, email addresses, full names, phone numbers, age, relationship status etc.
The report adds that the same database had been posted before and seen by security researcher Bob Diachenko. The ISP hosting the page took it down but it resurfaced with an extra 42 million records on a second server. The records have reportedly been “destroyed by unknown actor(s) who replaced personal info with dummy data and swapped in database names labelled with this advice: “please_secure_your_servers”.”