Scraped Data of 1.5 BILLION Facebook Users Offered for Sale on the Dark Web – Reports
“It’s the “biggest and most significant Facebook data dump to date,” according to the publication…”
via RT
Headline Image credit:© REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski
Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all down, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has another headache: The personal data of 1.5 billion customers, scraped from his platform, is reportedly being offered for sale on the dark web.
User IDs, real names, email addresses, phone numbers, and locations are among the data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook customers that’s up for sale, according to a report on the cybersecurity news outlet Privacy Affairs on Monday. The going price has been quoted as $5,000 for a million names.
🚩🚩 Personal Information of Over 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum
Data includes:
– Name
– Location
– Gender
– Phone numberAppears to be obtained from web scraping.https://t.co/F3qXa7yvge#cybersecurity #cybersec #Facebook #DarkWeb #privacy #hack
— Privacy Affairs (@Privacy_Affairs) October 4, 2021
The data “appears to be authentic” and was obtained through “scraping” – getting the information that users set to ‘public’ or allow quizzes or other questionable apps or pages to access.
It’s the “biggest and most significant Facebook data dump to date,” according to the publication – about three times greater than the April leak of 533 million phone numbers. Facebook said at the time this was “old data” and the security vulnerability responsible had been patched back in 2019.
The scraping obviously took place some time prior, with the first mention of it on the dark web being in early September.
As scraping Facebook data becomes harder some long-time actors are willing to sell their huge bulks on the darknet. The latest announcement contains 1.5 Billion entries and exceeds very much what we have seen so far. #facebook #api #leak #breach #darknet pic.twitter.com/ZhCQ7menhf
— Marc Ruef (@mruef) September 7, 2021
While the accounts affected have not been compromised in the strictest sense of the word, cybersecurity experts point out that the users affected will be at increased risk of getting unsolicited texts, ads, and emails from criminals who obtained the purloined data.
RT
Headline Image credit:© REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski