Facebook Groups were being used as Black Market to publicly sell stolen credit card numbers

According to security researchers, Facebook has a serious issue going on with regards to Groups that are often being misused for selling stolen credit card numbers and other illegal activity. Here is what we know:

Cisco's Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group published a blog post explaining how it tracked several Cybercrime Groups on  Facebook where illegal activity like publicly selling stolen credit card number was common.

Researchers tracked down 74 such groups with roughly 385,000 members.

In what could be even more shocking is that names of were openly promoting illegal activity. For example "Spam Professional," "Spammer & Hacker Professional," "Buy Cvv On THIS SHOP PAYMENT BY BTC," etc.

Apart from selling stolen credit cards, other groups were all about spam lists, hacking tools and identity information.

Security researchers say these groups are quite easy to locate for anyone possessing a Facebook account and a simple search for groups containing keywords like 'spam,' 'carding,' or 'CVV' will often show multiple results.

"Of course, once one or more of these groups has been joined, Facebook's own algorithms will often suggest similar groups, making new criminal hangouts even easier to find," Jon Munshaw and Jaeson Schultz, technical editor and technical leader said in a blog post.

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A similar issue was reported last year by KrebsOnSecurity. Although groups discovered by Krebs had been deleted, Talos discovered some news set of Facebook Groups indulged in illegal activity.

Facebook acknowledged the issue and said that the company is ‘investing heavily’ to curb this kind of illegal activity.

“These groups violated our policies against spam and financial fraud and we removed them, We know we need to be more vigilant and we’re investing heavily to fight this type of activity,” Facebook said in a statement.

Recently, there was a report that Facebook might be letting third-party apps publicly store your password, email address, account names and more on Amazon cloud servers. These storage servers were not password protected and anyone could see or download any data that was stored in public view.