Report has it that scraped data of 1.5 BILLION Facebook users is offered for sale on the dark web.
The personal data of 1.5 billion customers, scraped from his platform, is reportedly being offered for sale on the dark web.
User IDs, real names, email addresses, phone numbers, and locations are among the data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook customers that’s up for sale, according to a report on the cybersecurity news outlet Privacy Affairs on Monday. The going price has been quoted as $5,000 for a million names.
The data “appears to be authentic” and was obtained through “scraping” – getting the information that users set to ‘public’ or allow quizzes or other questionable apps or pages to access.
It’s the “biggest and most significant Facebook data dump to date,” according to the publication – about three times greater than the April leak of 533 million phone numbers. Facebook said at the time this was “old data” and the security vulnerability responsible had been patched back in 2019. – RT
Another fallout of the collapse is the loss of over $6 billion by the company.
According to Forbes, there are loss of billions of dollars as users continue to be shut out of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
After mass complaints about the various platforms in the Facebook family being down, and users getting error messages when trying to log on, the company said it was working to resolve the issue.
With all four now off-air for several hours, Mark Zuckerberg has faced a pile-on on rival social media platforms, and habitual Facebook users have taken to other apps that aren’t experiencing issues, such as Twitter and Telegram, to express their dissatisfaction. Many have even temporarily celebrated the absence of Facebook.
Facebook’s offices are as much of a mess for employees as its social media platforms are for users, according to anonymous workers who’ve spoken to reporters in the midst of the apparent companywide breakdown.
As the major Facebook outage dragged into hours, a Reddit poster claiming to be a member of the “recovery/investigation team” wrote the companywide snafu was indeed a “global outage for all FB-related services/infra[structure]” and explained that while repairs were underway, “the people with physical access is [sic] separate from the people with knowledge of how to actually authenticate to the systems and people who know what to actually do, so there is now a logistical challenge with getting all that knowledge unified.”
Facebook’s DNS [Domain Name Servers] were down due to what several commenters suggested was a configuration change that took effect right before the mega-crash.
A New York Times tech reporter had earlier confirmed that internal tools and communications platforms were down, including employee email and Workplace, which employees from different divisions use to communicate. “No one can do any work,” employees told him, likening the chaos to a “snow day” at the trillion-dollar company.
Reportedly, employees can’t even get into some of the buildings they need to access to evaluate the extent of the outage, as worker badges aren’t opening doors like they are supposed to.
The company’s chief technical officer eventually took to Twitter to promise “teams [were] working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible” [sic], adding “*sincere* apologies” to those affected by the outages.
Rumors and theories about what happened at Facebook have proliferated, including a report that the personal data of some 1.5 billion users is being sold on a dark-web hacker forum, coinciding with the outage. However, the alleged dump is said to have initially been posted two weeks ago, and may not be related to the Monday events.
The Facebook workers have allegedly been reduced to communicating via text message and Outlook email, according to AP reporter Philip Crowther.
The chaos at Facebook first became apparent to the public on Monday morning as users flooded other social media networks complaining they couldn’t login there – or to its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger – only to learn that neither could Facebook employees.
Facebook itself initially downplayed the drama, waiting several hours before tweeting a note acknowledging “some people” were “having trouble accessing our apps and products.” Apologizing for “any inconvenience,” they pledged they were “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
