Cyble, a cyber threat intelligence platform, which recently exposed the sale of over 500,000 Zoom accounts, is back with another worrying exposure: Cyble researchers have found a “threat actor” reveal the identities of 267 million Facebook users online for just 500 euros (₹ 41,500), as mentioned on Cyble’s blog.
The data includes email addresses, names, Facebook IDs, dates of birth and phone numbers which Cyble researchers were able to buy, download and verify. While no passwords were exposed by the hacker, the data exposed is enough to put together a phishing scam—which can lead to more valuable data being further stolen.
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Late last year, that same number of User IDs were found online for sale. “We are looking into this,” Facebook said at the time, “but believe it is likely information obtained before changes we made in the past few years to better protect people’s information.”
Facebook also revealed in November last year that at least 100 app developers may have accessed Facebook users' data for months, confirming that at least 11 partners "accessed group members' information in the last 60 days".While researchers state that they’re not able to figure out yet as to how hackers managed to access the data, they are suspecting that it might be because of a leakage in third party API or web scraping. Web scraping refers to the extraction of data from a website into a spreadsheet or a local file; it is most commonly used for competitor analysis, betting and market research.If you’re a Facebook user, it might be a good idea to change your password and to also ensure that you’ve not reused this password elsewhere; password reuse is the single biggest enabler of account hijacks. Facebook has also advised users to enable the two-factor authentication to ensure any username and password breach will not enable an attacker to access your account. Users can check whether their email addresses have been found in dark web data breaches on Cyble’s site.Follow Satviki on Instagram.
