(Karachi) Hackers have leaked the personal data of more than half a billion Facebook users online for free that includes personal information, phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, etc, local media reported on Monday.

As per details, the leaked data from 533 million users in 106 countries was posted on an obscure hacking forum.

Commenting on the matter, Facebook spokesperson Liz Shepherd said: “This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019.” He added, “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”

The data, which is believed to be more than a year old, could be used by criminals to commit identity fraud. The leaked data include records of 32 million users in the United States, 11 million users in the United Kingdom, and six million users in India.

Meanwhile, Israeli information security and cybercrime expert Alon Gal has raised doubts over Facebook's stance on the data leak issue. "Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking, and marketing," Gal stated.

This is not the first time that the data of Facebook users have been leaked online. The vulnerability that was uncovered in 2019 allowed millions of people's phone numbers to be scraped from Facebook's servers in violation of its terms of service. Facebook said that the vulnerability was patched in August 2019.

Facebook previously vowed to crack down on mass data-scraping after Cambridge Analytica scraped the data of 80 million users in violation of Facebook's terms of service to target voters with political ads in the 2016 election.