Basic Facebook Guide: How to find mobile number from Facebook

How to find mobile number from Facebook

Facebook really wants your phone number, nagging you for one as soon as you join. This isn't all bad since it can help secure your account with two-factor authentication. On the flipside, this makes it easy to reveal the private phone numbers of virtually anyone on Facebook, including celebrities and politicians. We're going to look at how a hacker would do this and how to protect yourself.

Many Facebook users may not even realize that their private phone number is connected to their Facebook account, having forgotten that they did so. Facebook isn't allowed to simply extract your number from your phone, but they can do what I refer to as the "app equivalent of cyberbullying" by repeatedly asking you to confirm and save your number each time you launch Facebook.

The default privacy setting on Facebook allows anyone to search for you by your phone number once you add it. This is not a new issue. It has been around as long as the Facebook Graph search, but Facebook chooses to see this issue as a feature, as a letter received by Belgian researcher Inti De Ceukelaire shows.
Image by Inti De Ceukelaire/Twitter
Certainly, some people, such as celebrities and politicians, should be more concerned than others about revealing their private number online. However, anyone could potentially have a cyberstalker or hacker target them. Once a hacker has a phone number and your name, they can quickly use open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools that we've covered on Null Byte to grab further public data like occupation, employer, spouse, relationship, any other public info.

A hacker could use the information to further social-engineering attacks by calling you directly. Think of the classic " Microsoft tech support" scam, only the caller trying to trick you knows your name and intimate details of your personal life. Armed with these, it's easy to make the target think the caller is legitimate.
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How would a hacker actually go about finding your number? In theory, if they had a lot of time, they could just search all 9,999,999,999 potential numbers until they stumbled upon yours. Clearly, this isn't very efficient, so let's see the right way of doing it. For a practice subject, I'll be using DC Mayor Muriel Bowser (2017) as a random city official. In the examples below, her number was changed to protect her real number.

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