reaches around 1,500 million users

The personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users is for sale on a hacker forum, which could allow cybercriminals and advertisers to target Internet users around the world, Privacy Affairs reported on Monday.

According to cybersecurity 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 type attacks Phishing and taking possession of accounts
• 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.

Traders claim to have obtained the data by web scratching or 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 endangers the safety of users of the social network, since the data could be used by hackers for sophisticated attacks by Phishing or social engineering.

Likewise, this information could fall into the hands of unscrupulous marketers to bombard a particular individual or groups of people with advertising.

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.