Millions of Facebook Profiles For Sale

Researchers at cyber security firm Cyble  recentlly discovered that over 500,000 Zoom accounts were being sold on the dark web and hacker forums at dirt-cheap prices. 

Now, the same firm has revealed that hackers are selling over 267 million Facebook profiles for £500 ($623) on Dark Web sites and hacker forums.  These personal details include their email, full name, last name, phone, Facebook ID, last connection, status, and age. While none of these records include passwords, they do contain information that could allow attackers to perform spear phishing or SMS attacks to steal credentials.

Last month, the noatble independent security researcher Bob Diachenko discovered an open Elasticsearch database that contained a little over 267 million Facebook records, with most being users from the United States. For many of these records, they contained a user's full name, their phone number, and a unique Facebook ID. The ISP hosting the database eventually took the server offline after being contacted by Diachenko.

A second server containing the same data plus an addition 42 million records was brought online but were hacked by unknown threat actors who left a message telling the owners to secure their servers.Of this new data, 16.8 million records included more information such as a Facebook user's email address, birth date, and gender.

It was not discovered who these servers belonged to, but Diachenko believed that it was owned by a criminal organisation who stole the data using the Facebook API before it was locked down or via scraping public profiles. Shortly after,  the expert reserachers at Cyble discovered a threat actor selling this database for £500 on the dark web and through hacking forums.
The database being sold does not contain Facebook account passwords, but it does contain email addresses and phone numbers for some users.

This could allow attackers to create spear-phishing campaigns that aim to steal your password using email campaigns or SMS texts that pretend to be from Facebook.

If the phishing emails contain information such as dates of birth and/or phone numbers, some users may be more prone to believe them and thus provide the attackers with the requested info. 

Cyble recommends users tighten their privacy settings on Facebook accounts and be cautious of unsolicited emails and text messages.

This is not the first time that Facebook user data has has been breached and been found hacker forums.  A similar dataset of Facebook profiles, mostly from the United States, was made available in an open database on Elasticsearch, containing details including users’ full name, their phone number, and a unique Facebook ID.

 A few days later on another database with an additional 42 million records was discovered online. This time it was attacked by another group of hackers who left a message “telling the owners to secure their servers.”

Security experts stronglu advise users should double-check the privacy and security settings of their Facebook accounts and have warned against interacting with unknown email or text messages related to social media accounts.

Mashable:       Medium:        TechRadar:         Bleeping Computer:        Techhradar

You Might Also Read:   

Facebook Could Face A GDPR Fine Of $1.63bn:

The Invisible Areas Of The World Wide Web: