Over 419 million records containing Facebook users’ phone numbers were recently discovered online, freely available to the public without a password after being discovered by a security researcher, reports said Wednesday.
The records held people’s Facebook IDs and the phone numbers listed on their accounts — and they were found over a year after the social media giant curbed access to those contacts, TechCrunch reported.
WATCH: Oct. 3, 2018 — Facebook says hackers didn’t use your login to access third-party apps
Facebook used to allow users to find people on the website by searching their phone numbers.
That feature was shut down in April 2018, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which “malicious actors” used the feature and the data of as many as 87 million users was compromised, as noted by CNN.
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These phone numbers are believed to have been scraped off the site before that happened.
READ MORE: Facebook to pay $5B for privacy mishaps in largest FTC penalty on tech company
The records are believed to include 133 million records for Facebook users in the United States, 50 million for users in Vietnam and 18 million for individuals in the U.K.
Security researcher Sanyam Jain found the records on a server and notified TechCrunch about his discovery.
The tech news website subsequently checked Facebook users’ phone numbers against the data and contacted the web host for the site where they were found.
WATCH: April 5, 2018 — Facebook’s data breach now affects 87 million users
The numbers were subsequently taken offline.
The company confirmed to the network that a security researcher had found them and reported it.
Facebook said it was investigating.
READ MORE: Facebook tightens rules around political advertisers ahead of U.S. election
In a statement to USA Today, Facebook said the database is old and that the company has “seen no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised.”
There’s no clarity as to who accessed the phone numbers and put them online, TechCrunch added.
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