A cybercriminal created a bot that sold access to millions of Facebook users’ mobile phone numbers through the Telegram messaging app, says a new report.
The bot extracted information from a massive database of phone numbers taken from Facebook before the social network made a security hole in 2019, according to Motherboard.
A Telegram support representative told The Post that the robot was blocked until Tuesday morning. But it is not clear when it was deactivated exactly and how long it was active on the platform.
Anyone who pulled the Telegram profile of the bot could enter the Facebook ID of the person they are looking for, and the bot would take the corresponding phone number, the outlet informed on Monday. It seems to have worked in the opposite direction – enter a phone number, and the robot will take the corresponding Facebook ID.
But there was a catch – the robot initially hid most of the phone number and forced users to pay to see everything, according to the report. It seems that prices range from $ 20 for a single “credit” to $ 5,000 for 10,000 credits.
The unidentified person who created the bot claimed that he could access phone numbers for 533 million Facebook users in dozens of countries, according to Alon Gal of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, which saw it about two weeks ago.
“It’s important that Facebook notifies its users of this violation so that they are less likely to be the victim of various hacking and social engineering attempts,” Gal told Motherboard.
Facebook said the data came from a previous security issue that allowed cyber attackers to match phone numbers with user profiles using sophisticated software code.
“This is old data,” a Facebook spokesman told The Post in an email. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
The Telegram robot did not return any matches when Facebook tried to verify it with newer user data, the technology giant added.
But that doesn’t help people who linked their phone numbers to their Facebook accounts before the problem was fixed, the motherboard noted. The social network already had over 1.6 billion daily active users in September 2019.
The bot appeared on Telegram, as the encrypted messaging service saw an increase in the number of users amid concerns about Facebook’s changes to the privacy policy for WhatsApp, its own messaging app. WhatsApp has pushed back the implementation of the policy.