Facebook data from 2019 breach posted on hackers forum

April 5 (UPI) -- A hacker has posted personal data belonging to 533 million Facebook users on an online forum, but the social media platform says it's information from a leak it reported and fixed two years ago.

The data -- phone numbers, emails, locations, and some biographical information -- was posted over the weekend in what was described by Business Insider as a low-level hackers forum.

Of the users included in the listing, about 32 million are in the United States and about 11 million are in Britain.

Facebook said in a response Monday that the information posted on the site came from a breach two years ago.

"This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019," the company told Complex.

Forbes reported Monday there's a website users can check to see if their personal information was included in the post on the hackers forum.

Facebook has previously disabled certain features to protect personal information after the Cambridge Analytica scandal that exposed data of 87 million users. The company said then it would block users from being able to search for a person's phone number or email address.

"We removed people's ability to directly find others using their phone number across both Facebook and Instagram -- a function that could be exploited using sophisticated software code, to imitate Facebook and provide a phone number to find which users it belonged to," a Facebook spokesperson told CNN.

Alon Gal, chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, criticized Facebook in a tweet for a lack of transparency.