Security News > 2021 > October > Over 1.5 billion Facebook users' personal data found for sale on hacker forum
An outage affected all of its sites, testimony from a whistleblower this week could put the company back in the legal hotseat, and now it's come out that private and personal data from more than 1.5 billion Facebook users was found for sale on a hacker forum.
Reported by privacy research company Privacy Affairs, the data found for sale doesn't indicate that the seller actually broke into Facebook's systems, nor that its data tied to any other data breach.
Instead, Privacy Affairs said that the data was allegedly obtained by scraping publicly available data shared by Facebook users.
Cross-checking the data against known Facebook leaks didn't bring up any matches, which Privacy Affairs said could indicate that this is all new, but legitimate, data.
The data exposed in this leak, if authentic, "May constitute one of the biggest and most significant Facebook data dumps to date," Privacy Affairs founder and CEO Miklos Zoltan said.
Because scraping only requires data to be available, Facebook users should ensure they never set their profiles to public.