Cybersecurity expert Miklos Zoltan has provided new details about the decline of Facebook-owned social media. He has said that currently the private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold in a well-known hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally. According to him, this is the largest and most significant storage of data on Facebook to date. "Apparently it has nothing to do with a previous Facebook data depot of 2021, which affected 500 million users. In late September 2021, a user of a well-known hacker forum posted an announcement claiming to possess the personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users.
The data is currently on sale on the relevant forum platform, with potential buyers having the option to purchase all the data immediately or in smaller quantities. "A prospective buyer claims to have received $ 5,000 for the data of 1 million Facebook user accounts," he said. Zoltan says that according to the forum poster, the data provided contains the following personal information of Facebook users: name, e-mail, location, gender, phone number, user ID.
The samples presented in the forum show that the data really seems to be authentic. Their cross-checking with known Facebook database leaks did not result in any match, implying that at first glance, the data provided in the sample is unique and not a copy or resale of a breach or scraping previously known data.
"The seller claims to represent a web group in action for at least four years, claiming that they have had over 18,000 customers during this time," said Milos, who has extensive experience in cyber security and data privacy after working. with international teams for more than 10 years on projects involving penetration testing, network security and cryptography.