Mark Zuckerberg's Personal Info Exposed in 500M User Data Breach

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personal cell phone number is included in the latest leak of Facebook users' personal information, a cybersecurity researcher discovered.

Several news outlets have reported on the leak, which was posted in a low-level hacking forum, Business Insider reports.

The information uploaded to the forum includes Zuckerberg's name, location, marriage details, birth date, and Facebook user ID.

The leak, which was originally reported over the weekend, exposed the information of over 500 million Facebook worldwide.

Regarding the #FacebookLeak, of the 533M people in the leak - the irony is that Mark Zuckerberg is regrettably included in the leak as well.

If journalists are struggling to get a statement from @facebook, maybe just give him a call, from the tel in the leak? ??@GazTheJourno pic.twitter.com/lrqlwzFMjU

— Dave Walker (@Daviey) April 3, 2021

Cyber researcher Dave Walker said Zuckerberg, as well as Facebook co-founders Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz, were also among the users who had their information leaked.

Facebook calls the leak 'old data'

Insider, the first outlet to report the leak, contacted Facebook on Sunday, and a spokesperson for the company said, "this is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019." However, they did not comment on reports about Zuckerberg's personal information.

Though the hack may have been reported in 2019, Holmes states that the posting of the entire dataset on the hacking forum means that it is now open to a much larger, potentially malicious, audience.

Data and privacy breaches are, unfortunately, a large part of Facebook's history. The company was hit with a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission for its involvement in the much-publicized Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2019.

More recently, Australia announced it would sue Facebook for $589 billion for repeated privacy breaches. The company faces a large list of similar fines.

How to check if your personal info was exposed in the latest Facebook breach

Thankfully, a handy website is up and running that allows you to check if your personal information was exposed in the leak alongside that of Mark Zuckerberg and 500 million others.

As reported by The Next Web, the website haveibeenpwned loads email IDs of profiles that were exposed in various breaches, allowing users to check if they were exposed by simply keying in their email address.

All you have to do is head over to haveibeenpwned.com on your smartphone or computer and enter your email ID. 

If your email was compromised, you will get a warning to change your email password and to enable two-factor authentication.

New breach: Facebook had 2.5M addresses exposed in an incident that impacted 533M subscribers' phone numbers. Most records contained name and gender, many also included DoB, location, relationship status and employer. 65% were already in @haveibeenpwned https://t.co/ltMkbZi9sK

— Have I Been Pwned (@haveibeenpwned) April 4, 2021

By scrolling down, you can also view all the breaches that may have included information linked to the email address you entered. The service's Twitter page is also a pretty handy tool for keeping up to date with the latest news on data breaches, as can be seen in the post above.

As for Facebook, the company promised to "crack down on platform abuse" in a blog post released shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. As a quick scroll through a timeline of Facebook's history shows, however, the company's response has been incredibly patchy when it comes to privacy issues.