FACEBOOK Leaked History: How Many Users Does It Affect

Personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users were for sale in a pirate forum, which could allow cybercriminals and advertisers to target Internet users around the world, Privacy Affairs reported on Monday.

According to IT security specialists:

• Data contains name, email, phone number, location, gender and user ID
• they seem to be original
• They were obtained by scraping the canvas
• They can be used for phishing and account takeover attacks
• They are supposedly new: from 2021

In its report, Privacy Affairs shared screenshots of the forum in question, where a post from the alleged seller can be seen, claiming to represent a group of “web scrapers” and to have had “over 18,000 customers” in the Over the course of four years he published the RT portal in Spanish.

Merchants claim to have obtained the data by web scraping, a technique for extracting information from websites using software. The online data available and accessible to the public is automatically collected and organized into lists and databases, the portal explains.

Experts point out that this leak puts the safety of users of the social network at risk, as the data could be used by hackers for sophisticated phishing or social engineering attacks.

Besides, this information could fall into the hands of unscrupulous traders to bombard an individual with advertising in particular or to groups of people.

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 Facebook data spill this year, at during which 500 million people were affected.

Last April, the personal data of Internet users from more than 100 countries was also uploaded for free by a user on a discreet hacking forum.

The stolen information included full usernames, phone numbers, Facebook IDs, locations, dates of birth, biographical information and, in some cases, email addresses, among others.

Black Monday for Facebook stocks

Shares of major US IT companies fell on Monday after various platforms including Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and TikTok suffered massive malfunctions.

The Downdetector site showed cuts in densely populated areas. Indeed, around 12:15 in Argentina, the three applications belonging to Facebook stopped working and, according to the aforementioned specialized portal, in less than an hour, they added more than 20,100 incidents reporting problems.

Downdetector, which only tracks crashes by compiling status reports from a number of sources, including errors sent by users to its platform, has shown that over time it has There were already over 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. . It is possible that the decline will affect a greater number of users.

According to data from the same portal, the problems were registered in the territory of European, Asian and Latin American countries, as well as in the United States, Canada and Australia.

Among the complaints reported were the inability to open applications, access the site, connect to the server and send messages.

For his part, New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac wrote on his Twitter account that the problem is not only affecting Facebook’s services and applications, but also its internal communication tools and platforms. “No one can work. Several people I have spoken to have said it equates to ‘a snow day’ at the company,” he said.

Another New York Times tech reporter, Sheera Frenkel, said she spoke to a Facebook employee, who reported that workers were also unable to enter company buildings because their cards were no longer working.

At the end of the day, The cause that affects the services was still unknown, however, the error message on the Facebook website suggested an error from Domain Name Systems (DNS). DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations, Reuters explained.

The impact of the problem was immediate on the stock markets, particularly on Wall Street, where shares of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB), the tech giant led by Mark Zuckerberg, they fell by almost 5.5%, as they were trading at close to $ 325. This drop in the Nasdaq was also reflected in the CEDEARs of the company listed on the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange, since they posted a drop of around 6%.

“We are aware that some people are currently having issues with WhatsApp. We are working to get everything back to normal and will send you an update here as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience! Twitter’s WhatsApp said.

As if this issue were irrelevant in and of itself, Facebook’s actions are also affected by the statements of a former company employee, Frances Haugen, who has publicly assured that the company puts its interests above the safety of people. users.

“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. Time and time again, he chose to optimize for his own interests and earn more money, ”said Frances Haugen, former company employee on“ 60 Minutes ”.

She is a 37-year-old data scientist, who has worked for Google and Pinterest and who leaked company documents to U.S. officials claiming her products fuel hatred and harm children’s mental health, has appeared at television to reveal your identity.

Facebook accumulate a loss of more than 15% in a month, in line with what is happening with the rest of the tech sector in general, which has been affected by increased investor interest in cyclical stocks and rising yields on Treasury bonds. The Nasdaq index faces another difficult day today, falling 2.58%.

The company bought Instagram on April 9, 2012, after paying $ 1 billion in cash and shares. Two years later, he acquired WhatsApp, in February 2014, for $ 19 billion, of which he paid $ 4 billion in cash, $ 12 billion in Facebook shares and $ 3 billion in exclusive shares for the founders of WhatsApp, Jan Koum and Brian Acton.

The group of companies in total has a market valuation of over $ 900 billion and is sixth in the ranking of the world’s largest companies, behind Apple, Saudi Aramco, Microsft, Amazon and Alphabet (Google).