Report: Hackers Are Selling the Personal Data of 1.5 Billion Facebook Users

According to a privacy research firm, the personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users has been found for sale on a hacker forum.

TechRepublic reports that this week Facebook faced an outage of all of its online services that lasted for six hours and was forced to defend itself from the testimony of a company whistleblower. As if things couldn’t get much worse for the tech giant, the privacy research firm Privacy Affairs has revealed that the personal data of 1.5 billion Facebook users has been found for sale on a hacker forum.

Privacy Affairs stated that the data does not indicate that the seller managed to gain access to Facebook’s internal systems, instead the data appeared to be obtained by scraping publicly available data shared by Facebook users.

While the information was publicly available, it still contains names, email addresses, locations, genders, phone numbers, and Facebook User ID information, all of which could be used to compromise a Facebook user’s security. All of this data could be used as clues for hackers to reset user passwords and gain access to even more personal data. – READ MORE