The Facebook Data Leak Explained

This report details the 2019 harvest and 2021 public disclosure of 533 million Facebook user records — including phone numbers, names, emails, locations, employers and birth dates — which were circulated and sold on cybercriminal forums. The data was likely obtained via large-scale scraping and possible abuse of Facebook's contact-importer feature (patched in Sept 2019); although no passwords were exposed, the breach's scale and active sharing significantly increase risk of targeted spam, phishing and vishing attacks.