In September, a post was made on a popular internet forum known to be frequented by hackers. It offered the personal data of more than 1.5B users of the popular Facebook social media platform. This post occurred before Facebook went down on Monday, October 4th.
The data is supposedly for sale in whole or in any part of any size. One offer from another forum user came in at $5000 for the data of a million users. The poster warrants that the data is all from 2021, and the data appears to have passed a cross-checking process to show that it is unique.
According to Privacy Affairs, the data includes information on users' names, email addresses, physical locations, genders, phone numbers and user IDs, among other potential data.
This data has been obtained by "scraping" rather than hacking, according to the post itself. Scraping is a process whereby bots crawl the internet looking for information and simply correlates, classifies and organizes it. This means that no hacking is necessary.
Unfortunately, this data can be every bit as sensitive and personal in nature as any data obtained by hacking. Besides targeted marketing, lawful or otherwise, this data may be used for such things as various forms of phishing, or other types of social engineering.
It is thought that this data is either simply obtained from public profiles, or from "surveys" which then gain access to personal data.
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