Over 81,000 Facebook accounts coming from Russia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and even the United States have all been compromised! It was also stated that their own private messages were published and could have possibly been sold! This data breach is quite alarming as the Facebook accounts were reportedly being sold for a really low price.
How many Facebook users are hacked?
According to an story by PCMag, an advertisement that first appeared on an English-launguage forum back in September had offered to "sell personal information" of the compromised Facebook users for as low as just 10 cents per account. The information was reportedly presented by the BBC. The information however has reportedly been taken down.
Hackers noted to BBC that a whopping 120 million users, which 2.7 million of them were reportedly Russian, had had their personal accounts hacked. Although this seems quite unlikely since Facebook would have noticed quite a substantial breach, according to a particular cyber-security company known as Digital Shadows, which has reportedly been working along with the BBC.
Facebook Russian hacker victims
The BBC also reached out to the five different Russian Facebook users who have had their private messages stolen. Each one of them had confirmed that the stolen information did belong to them. The conversations reportedly included details regarding concerts, holidays, complaints about a particular son-in-law, and other private information.
Digital Shadows had also confirmed that the given data from a further 176,000 Facebook accounts was also accessible. However, some of the information that included phone numbers, email addresses, and moer have all been scraped from the members that have failed to hide it from their own profile.
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What is Facebook doing about the hacking?
BBC also tried to email the hackers and pretend to be interested in ordering a whopping 2 million account details. The hackers were then asked as to whether or not it was directly related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or even whether the given leaks were all linked to Kremlin, the hacker or hackers responded that it wasn't.
Facebook stated that the data was most likely gathered through the use of certain malicious browser extensions. According to the Facebook executive known as Guy Rosen, it was stated that they have contacted the particular browser makers in order to ensure that the known malicious extensions will no longer be available for download through their stores.
It was also stated that they have already contacted the law enforcement and are also working along with local authorities in order to be able to remove the whole website that had displayed information from the compromised Facebook accounts. Rosen also stated that his own hands were quite full with a confirmed breach of about an approximate of a whopping 30 million Facebook users. The exact number of compromised Facebook accounts has not yet been announced but the number could be quite alarming.
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This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
