Facebook confirms year-long data breach affecting 6m users

Social networking giant reveals emails and phone numbers of some six million users may have been exposed to third parties.

The phone numbers and email addresses of approximately six million Facebook users have been inadvertently exposed over the past year, the social networking giant has confirmed.

In a blog post published late on Friday, the company said six million users’ contact details may have been accessible to third parties who already had some form of connection to them.

Facebook has blamed the issue on a technical bug affecting the company’s friend recommendation tool, which flags up members it thinks users might want to add as a connection on the site.

The bug is thought to have emerged in 2012, but was only discovered by Facebook’s White Hat Security Team last week.

SOURCE: itpro.co.uk