Facebook is facing another security issue today, confirming that 419 million records were left in an unprotected server.
According to TechCrunch, 18 million UK phone numbers were among the millions of records left in an open online server that was not secured with a password.
However, when Facebook confirmed that these records had been exposed it said the total number would be closer to half due to duplicate entries.
A Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement: “This dataset is old and appears to have information obtained before we made changes last year to remove people's ability to find others using their phone numbers.
“The dataset has been taken down and we have seen no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised.”
The data is thought to have come from previous publicly available information that allowed people to search for others using their mobile number – this function was disabled in April 2018 as a response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Along with the 18 million UK phone numbers, 133 million records for users in the US and 50 million records for users in Vietnam are also reported to have been exposed.
In April this year, Facebook revealed that millions of Instagram passwords were exposed during an internal security lapse.
Additional reporting by Jamie Harris, PA Science Technology Reporter.
