Alert for a possible cyberattack: they report the sale of personal data of Facebook users

In the midst of the global decline of the most popular social networks, including those of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, users are concerned about the security of their accounts.

According to the portal specializing in computer security, Privacy Affairs, the personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users is for sale in a “hacker” forum, which could allow cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users around the world.

However, it should be clarified that this information leak has nothing to do with the crash of the application servers.

According to cybersecurity specialists, the compromised data contains: name, email, phone number, location, gender and user ID.

This information was obtained through a method called “web scraping”. It is a web data extraction or collection process in which publicly available data is accessed and organized into lists and databases.

This information can be used for phishing and account takeover attacks.

Privacy Affairs said it was the biggest and most significant data breach in the history of the social network, which apparently is unrelated to a previous data dump from Facebook this year, during which 500 million users were affected.

Finally, the portal said the “stolen” information would come from accounts created from 2021, although this is not known for sure.