Facebook: Magnitude of the leaked data

About 2 days ago bleepingcomputers reported about a leak of over 500.000.000 Facebook user records.

Scratching the surface revealed that the data is available to nearly everyone.

Here are some numbers to estimate the magnitute of the leak.

77 Gb of plaintext data from 105 countries world wide can be found on the Internet. Some indicators make clear that at least part of the data is from 2019, but only Facebook can make clear if there is also more current data included.

The collections seem not to be from one web scraping session, but might be local web scraping campaigns in each country. Some file names are even in local languages.

A world map with all countries (file size in MB).

 


 

Here are the top 20 based on file size in MB.

 



The data is of the following categories.

  • name
  • sex
  • relationship status
  • address
  • employer
  • email address (very seldom)
  • year of birth (very seldom)
  • telephone number (very seldom)
  • some dates and IDs

Note that citizens from various EU states are affected which is a violation of the EU-GDPR... let's see what the EU lawyers will make out of it.

Update:

The picture gets clearer if we measure the number of records per country.


And here again the top 20 but this time based on records per country.



 

Cheers,

Thomas

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