Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Data of Over 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum

Privacy Affairs: “The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.…Data Obtained by Scraping – The traders claim to have obtained the data by scraping rather than hacking or compromising individual users’ accounts. Scraping is a process of web data extraction or harvesting where publicly available data is accessed and organized into lists and databases. While technically, no accounts have been compromised, this is little solace to those whose data may now end up in the hands of unscrupulous internet marketers and likely also in the hands of cybercriminals. Unethical marketers may utilize this data to bombard specific individuals or groups of individuals with unsolicited advertising. The fact that phone numbers, real-life location, and users’ full names are included in the data is especially concerning. In addition, SMS and Push notification spam are becoming increasingly more prevalent even though most countries made these practices illegal many years ago…”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.