Facebook claims data of 533 million users was stolen long time ago, experts say breach is fresh

A report noted that even if the Facebook breach dates back to 2019, it will cause trouble to the company as, under certain privacy regulations including Europe's GDPR, the social media giant should have alerted its users about the breach.

Facebook’s data breach of 533 million users dates back to 2019, according to the social media giant. Facebook, yesterday, in a blog post noted that the malicious actors did not even hack its system but scraped data through its platform which it refers to as automated software lifting public information from the internet that can end up being distributed in online forums like this. “It is important to understand malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019,” the social media giant noted. Facebook said that vulnerability was discovered in 2019 that allowed phone numbers of millions of users to be scraped from Facebook servers. It said that the vulnerability was patched in August 2019. "This is old data that was previously reported in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019," a Facebook spokesperson said. The leaked data set was reportedly created by attackers who abused a flaw in a Facebook address book contacts import feature.