Facebook’s Stock Hits Record High Despite Massive Data Leak

What massive data leak? Facebook’s stock price jumped on Monday morning to a new all-time high, despite the revelation this past weekend that more than half a billion of its users had their data posted online. Facebook’s share price increased about 3% in early trading to hit $307.73, setting a new record high for the tech giant; its previous all-time high of $304.67 was set last August. After Monday’s jump, Facebook is now worth $876 billion. Monday’s gains also added to a recent run for Facebook, which has seen its stock price increase about 16% in the last month. Some may have expected that Wall Street momentum would stall on Monday, though, after Business Insider reported on Saturday that 533 million Facebook users had their data leaked on “a low-level hacking forum.” The leaked data, per Business Insider, included users’ “phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses.” Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t escape the wreckage, with his phone number and other personal information included among the leaked data. A Facebook rep told the outlet the privacy vulnerability that led to the hack was patched in 2019. Even with the data being a few years old, data security experts have said the information is still beneficial to cyber crooks looking to steal someone’s identity. “These are the pieces of data cyber criminals spend time searching for to perform social engineering attacks (a type of hacking) — but now they’re all in one place and easily accessible in this leak, which makes social engineering quicker and easier,” SocialProof Security CEO Rachel Tobac told CNN.