For Sale: 533 million Facebook users’ records

For Sale: 533 million Facebook users’ records

A hacking forum is offering a database containing more than 533 million Facebook users’ details. The database was first noticed by Alon Gal, the Chief Technology Officer of Hudson Rock on April 3rd and was posted by a user called TomLiner on Raid Forums.

It claims that the information includes user names, mobile phone numbers, occupation, marital status, gender, country, city, and for some of them, email addresses.

The validity of the data has been confirmed by multiple publications. Bleeping Computer says that it has records and numbers for three Facebook founders: Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz.

Old news

The data is not new and dates back to 2019. Facebook said to Reuters that the data is ‘very old’ and related to an issue it says it fixed in August 2019. The data seems to have been scraped from Facebook instead of being acquired through directly hacking the company.

This is also not the first time that Facebook users’ data has been offered on the internet. The same database was offered for sale in May last year and through a Telegram bot in January.

ShinyHunters’ stomping grounds

Some reports say that the database is now being offered for free but it is not that simple. To get access to it, Raid Forum users have to pay eight credits (a form of currency on the forum that’s valued at $2.19).

Even so, five pages into this thread reveal a forum user who provided direct links to some of the data for free (no credits needed.)

Raid Forums regularly makes the news since it is a favorite dumping ground for a group names ShinyHunters. Some of their recent dumps include 1.9 million user records for the photo editor Pixlr and 2.28 million user records for MeetMindful (a dating site.)