reaches around 1,500 million users

• 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.

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.