Security News > 2021 > April > Facebook leaks strategy to numb reaction to data scraping incidents
Facebook's long-term strategy is to desensitize users about leaked data dumps that were collected through scraping the public portion of the social network.
The data also contained private phone numbers collected because of a vulnerability that Facebook fixed in August 2019, the company told BleepingComputer.
Among the phone numbers in the database was that of Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz, three of the Facebook social network founders.
When inquiring about the 533 million data breach, a journalist at DataNews publication in the Netherlands received by accident internal communication from Facebook on how to handle the incident.
Facebook's goal with this is to "Avoid criticism," which it has seen plenty for downplaying the seriousness of the 533 million user data leak by labeling it as "Old data that was previously reported on in 2019.".
While scraping collects information that is already public, gathering data en masse on users of a service could serve ill-intended actors in various attacks like phishing or SIM swapping.