News
Personal Information Of 533 Million Facebook Users Leaked Online
It seems that Facebook’s data privacy issues won’t ever end. Security researcher Alon Gal has recently revealed that the personal information belonging to around 533 million Facebook users has been leaked online.
The massive dataset is currently being shared on various underground hacking forums for free, and it affects users from 106 countries including every country in the MENA region. At 32 million records, US Facebook users represent the greatest chunk of the dataset, followed by 11 million users from the UK, and 6 million users from India.
Besides user’s full names, the leak includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, locations, birthdates, bios, and sometimes even email addresses.
“So what’s the impact? For a targeted attack where you know someone’s name and country, it’s great for mobile phone lookup,” explains Troy Hunt, the creator of the Have I Been Pwned database. “But for spam based on using phone number alone, it’s gold. Not just SMS, there are heaps of services that just require a phone number these days, and now there’s hundreds of millions of them conveniently categorized by country with nice mail merge fields like name and gender.”
Twitter: @UnderTheBreach
The stolen information actually comes from 2019, and cybercriminals had access to it for quite some time now through a Telegram bot, which makes it possible to look up a phone number and receive the corresponding user’s Facebook ID, and the other way around — all for a small fee.
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“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” said Liz Bourgeois, Facebook’s director of strategic response communications, in a Saturday tweet.
Old or not, the fact that the personal information of half a billion Facebook users is circulating around on the internet for free is the least the social media giant and its users need right now considering the number of new cybersecurity threats created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hopefully, Facebook will take the steps necessary to minimize the impact of the breach and protect its users.
To find out whether or not your Facebook account data was among the leak, go to HaveIBeenPwned.com and enter the email address you use to login to Facebook with. If your email address is detected within the millions of accounts, HaveIBeenPwned will let you know.
News
Egypt’s Mobile Wallets Are Booming, But Cash Still Has Power
Egypt’s telecom regulator says $57.6 billion moved through more than 57 million wallets in six months. And one operator handled 77% of the value.
Egypt’s mobile wallets handled EGP 2.96 trillion ($57.6 billion) in transactions in the first half of 2026, according to the National Telecom Regulatory Authority – a 56% rise on the EGP 1.90 trillion ($36.9 billion) recorded a year earlier. Transactions grew faster still, up 62% to 2.22 billion, while registered wallets climbed 23% to 57.01 million.
On one reading, that is exactly what Egypt’s regulators have been pushing for: a payments system that runs through telecom-linked wallets rather than banknotes. But the same data shows how far cash still reaches into it. Cash withdrawals made up just 12% of the transactions taking money out of wallets, yet 75% of the value withdrawn or spent.
Money arrives mostly from bank accounts: transfers through InstaPay accounted for 78% of deposit transactions and 58% of the value deposited, while incoming remittances from abroad made up 3% of deposit transactions but 10% of their value. Once inside, it largely moves between wallets – wallet-to-wallet transfers accounted for 54% of all transactions and 67% of total value, with mobile and internet top-ups a distant second at 25% of volume. In effect, the wallet is serving as a transfer layer: the place money passes through between the bank account and the banknote.
That layer also runs predominantly through one operator. Vodafone Cash held 53% of registered wallets and 57% of active ones, but handled 69% of transactions and 77% of their value. Its nearest rival, e& money, held 23% of registered wallets but 14% of transaction value; Orange Cash 20% and 8%; WE Pay 4% of wallets. How many of the 57.01 million are active is not stated.
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Adoption is rather uneven in other respects. Men held 38 million wallets, or 67% of the total, against 19 million held by women. Users aged 26 to 45 accounted for half of all wallets, and Cairo alone had 10.6 million, or 19% of the national total, with Giza next at 6.5 million.
The NTRA says it is continuing to work with telecom operators on the regulatory framework for wallet services, part of a wider effort to expand electronic payments and financial inclusion. Its own figures show that effort succeeding on the way in. On the way out, three-quarters of the value still leaves as cash.
Egypt’s Mobile Wallets Are Booming, But Cash Still Has Power
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