If the blackout that left Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp off the air for more than 6 hours was not enough, a post on the forum dark web announced the sale of more than 1.5 billion data from users of the platforms this Monday (4.Oct.2021).
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A “package” of 1 million pieces of data would cost US$5,000 – almost R$27,300 at the current price – in the space traditionally used by cyber criminals. Information is from the specialized site Privacy Affairs. If confirmed, this will be Facebook’s biggest data leak, which has 2.7 billion users.
The site says the information has nothing to do with Facebook’s global outage. The report was published 12 hours before the network crash and publication in the forum would have occurred on September 22nd.
The data would also be unrelated to Facebook’s data leak in April this year, when 500 million users were exposed, the site said. Criminals claim that the information comes from a public database, shared by the users themselves.
“Various media and Twitter users misinterpret this as the result of a hack or data breach, which is not the case”, says the text.
According to the author of the publication in dark web, the data provided would have the following information about Facebook users:
- Name
- Location
- Genre
- Phone number
- user id
Seller claims to be a representative of a group of data scrapers in operation for at least 4 years. And that, in this period, it had more than 18,000 customers. Upon cross-checking, the website identified that the samples are authentic.
What is data scraping?
Data scraping is the automatic collection of publicly accessible data online, usually done by softwares. Most of the information comes from profiles defined as “public” on Facebook by the owners themselves.
Another popular but illegal method is data collection via fake Facebook surveys or questionnaires. Some examples are disguised searches – something like “Take the test and find out when you’re getting married” or “Find out what character you are on that series”.
By answering these “surveys”, developers gain access to all of Facebook’s personal information, such as full name, email, phone number, location, gender and, depending on the questionnaires, even users’ behavioral and consumption patterns.
To avoid falling into traps, the ideal is never to set accounts as fully public (on any social network) nor to enter random quizzes, polls or games on Facebook – unless they are offered by a verified publisher.