1.5 billion personal information of Facebook users allegedly published for sale

The personal information of about 1.5 billion Facebook users worldwide was reportedly listed for sale following a recent leak.

A member of a forum known to hackers claimed to have the information in late September and offered to sell it in pieces to others on the forum, according to a report by Privacy Affairs. One user claimed to have obtained a quote of $ 5,000 for the information of a million users.

The user allegedly in possession of the leaked information claimed that it included the following for each Facebook account: name, email address, location, gender, phone number and user ID.

The samples shared by the user appear to have been genuine, according to Privacy Affairs. The outlet also checked the information against previous leaks and found that the alleged information was a legitimately new leak, not old data being sold. The hacker claimed to be in charge of a four-year-old data scraping operation with 18,000 customers.

However, several forum users reported that they did not receive anything after sending money to the original poster. This could indicate that the alleged leak was in fact a scam or that the alleged data holder was late.

News week contacted Facebook for comment on this story and to possibly confirm the veracity of the leak.

If the information was indeed obtained through a data scraper, probably no real account has been compromised yet. Accounts could still be accessible if the data was acquired by the right kind of cybercriminals. It is also possible that it is acquired through marketing operations and used to serve certain advertisements to affected users.

A similar data breach occurred in the spring and affected around 533 million users in 106 countries. The information was deemed legitimate by outlets like Business Insider, which used Facebook’s password reset feature to partially confirm phone numbers associated with certain emails.

This latest alleged hack comes around the same time that Facebook and its affiliate platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, suffered an extended outage. Users around the world started reporting their inability to access services early Monday. Shortly before 4 p.m. ET, the sites remained inaccessible.

“We are aware that some people have difficulty accessing our applications and products,” Facebook said on its official Twitter account. “We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Internet analyst Doug Madory said Facebook’s problems could stem from roadside takings from the domain name system, preventing browsers from correctly translating web addresses into IP addresses.

Correction (10/4/2021, 7:30 p.m.): An earlier version of the title of this story referred to a hack, however, this has not been confirmed. It is currently believed that the data was obtained by scraping publicly available information.