533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

Post by Scoundreller » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

Someone wrote: post #334

londons_explore wrote: post #28

Looks like this is the "To match users to their friends by phone number, you need an API which can take as input a phone number, and return information about if that number has an associated account" problem. There is no way to let a user find their friends on a service without such an API. Yet if you have such an API, someone can simply brute force all phone numbers worldwide (there are only 10^10), and now they hav…

I think there are way more than 10^10 phone numbers in the world. I think there are 10^10 combinations in the USA alone (filtering by unused area code, etc will decrease that number, but even then https://www.ck12.org/c/probability/permutation/rwa/Wrong-Num... says almost 8×10⁹ remain) Also, at least some countries have longer phone numbers (Germany, the UK and China have 11-digit ones, for example), and the internat…

Post by Scoundreller » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

uyt wrote: post #280

uniqueid wrote: post #18

We should start thinking of these breaches in terms of their accumulated impact. It's not the 1990s anymore, where data is difficult to store and networking too slow to move it. We should assume the leaked data doesn't go away; that instead people out there are consolidating Equifax data with Vastaamo data, adding data from Exchange hacks and the Accellion hack, to cross-reference with data from Facebook... it's like…

Honestly sounds like a fun job for future historians. By aggregating all the leaks over a long period, how much of a person can you reconstruct? For example even though I am using a throwaway account, HN's logs might one day get compromised. So now they can join the IP address to other compromised sites that I was logged into using my usual email. And from my email they already have my name, SSN, address, phone numbe…

Post by Scoundreller » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:33 AM UTC

thechao wrote: post #82

rikkipitt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m on iOS and don’t think there’s a way of blocking unsolicited calls until after the fact... I hope to be proven wrong though! The odd thing is, the calls often come through having a caller ID very similar to my own number.

The best I’ve found is to simply reject all calls not in my contacts. Real callers leave a voicemail, which gets transcribed.

Post by swiley » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 3:54 AM UTC

b212 wrote: post #328

banana_giraffe wrote: post #272

Looking at the leak others have pointed to, there are a surprising number of people working in a particular imaginary company: sqlite> select company, count(*) as c from usa where length(company) > 0 group by company order by c desc limit 10; company c ---------------------------------------- ---------- Self-Employed 459119 Facebook 181013 Retired 71210 The Krusty Krab 61550 Hollister Co. 42304 U.S. Army 39682 Stay-a…

Could you please tell me how did you convert it to sqlite? I've got a huge 1 GB txt file that crashes my comp every time I try to search for myself there :( Thank you!

Post by fuzxi » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:06 AM UTC

hosteur wrote: post #295

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I'm just getting a "Please open Telegram to view this post from @freedomf0x" message. Any way to access this without signing up for Telegram? The irony of giving my personal info to another 3rd party just to check if my personal info was leaked by a different party is too much...

Yeah I assume that the data is not actually hosted in Telegram so would be really nice with a direct link or magnet or similar.