Data of Over 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Reportedly Being Sold on Hacker Forum Amid Worldwide Outage
18:37 GMT 04.10.2021 (Updated: 18:23 GMT 03.11.2022)
© REUTERS / Carlos Jasso
Subscribe
The private personal data of 1.5 billion Facebook users is reportedly being sold on a popular hacking forum.
In late September, an announcement was posted on a hacking forum that claimed to have the name, email, phone number, location, gender, and user ID of 1.5 billion Facebook users. One prospective buyer has allegedly been quoted at $5,000 per 1 million Facebook accounts. This would value the entire set of Facebook user data at $7.5 million.
In a subsequent post, the seller alleges to represented a large company that works to scrape Facebook for data. The seller adds that the company has been in operation for at least four years and has over 18,000 clients.
In one post, the seller claims "We are legit company."
Web Scraping is a process that uses bots to extract publically available content and data from websites. If the seller is to be believed, it means no accounts have been compromised. However, the seller utilizing a hacking forum to garner clients does little to ease fears that the 1.5 billion Facebook users, the company allegedly has data on, won't suffer as a result. Dubious internet marketers and cybercriminals can now bid on these peoples' personal data and do with it as they see fit.
The news of 1.5 billion Facebook users' personal data being for sale comes at a particularly troubling time. It has been confirmed that Facebook and Instagram have been withdrawn from the global routing system of Domain Name System (DNS).
Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find https://t.co/qHzVq2Mr4E or https://t.co/JoIPxXI9GI got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables. Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) October 4, 2021
While at the same time, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp's domain names have been listed for sale. This is all in the wake of the bombshell "60 Minutes report" where whistleblower, Frances Haugen, claims Facebook knows that the platform spreads hate, violence, and misinformation and prioritizes that content as it generates more engagement and thus profit for the company.
Someone nuked the DNS A and AAA records for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp 🤭 pic.twitter.com/8TaU2eR1mm
— @jack lets nazis target my family (@chadloder) October 4, 2021
The technical failures at Facebook have even prevented its employees from gaining access to company buildings as their access badges have stopped working. It has also been reported that Facebook's internal platforms are out as well.
JUST IN - Facebook employees reportedly can't enter buildings to evaluate the Internet outage because their door access badges weren’t working (New York Times)
— Dave Bondy (@DaveBondyTV) October 4, 2021
Facebook's security team informed the New York Times that it was "unlikely that a cyberattack had taken place because one hack was unlikely to affect so many apps at once."
The fallout from all of these scandals and failures have not been lost on investors. Facebook's stock has dropped 5.2% today, costing CEO Mark Zuckerberg $6.6 billion in personal net worth and dropping him to 5th wealthiest person on Earth according to Forbes.
Forbes magazine estimates Mark Zuckerberg's losses at $6.6 billion after all his social media applications stopped. https://t.co/yf9zokV1RN
— Che Guevara (@Che_guevara_in_) October 4, 2021
