Data of 1.5 billion Facebook users found for sale on hacker site, now taken down: Report

Days after tech-giant Facebook and its sister companies faced a global outage lasting 6 hours, reports have surfaced claiming that the data of 1.5 billion Facebook users has been found for sale on a hacker forum. According to a report by TechRepublic, privacy research firm 'Privacy Affairs' has revealed that the personal data of over 1.5 billion users which includes names, email addresses, locations, genders, phone numbers, and Facebook User ID information was found on a hacker forum recently.

The data has been obtained by the company by 'scraping', as per Privacy Affairs. This means that the seller did not necessarily manage to gain access to Facebook’s internal systems, but obtained the information by 'scraping' publicly available data and organising it into databases and lists. However, the breach still comes as a concern for a Facebook user's security. It could provide hackers with clues to reset user passwords and gain access to even more personal data.

Data taken down after Facebook request 

After the matter came to light, Facebook sent a takedown request. As per the latest reports, the post has been taken down from the hacker forum. Privacy Affairs stated that the exposé came to the fore with the help of a four-year-old scraping business. The seller claimed that the group had been operating for the past four years serving more than 18,000 clients.

If data exposed in the leak is authentic, then it could constitute one of the biggest and most significant Facebook data dumps to date, as per Privacy Affairs founder and CEO Miklos Zoltan. He also revealed that Facebook Quizzes are a common way for hackers to harvest data. Every time someone enters one of these surveys or quizzes, they permit the creators of these games to view their personal Facebook information such as full name, email, phone number, location, gender and more, he stated.

On Monday, October 4, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg lost $7 billion after Facebook’s platforms-- Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Oculus VR services faced a worldwide outage. Users of the social networking platforms received error messages for the most part of the day which in turn, pulled down the stocks of the Silicon Valley firm by nearly 5%.