A prospective buyer reportedly offered at least $ 5,000 for 1 million profiles. Facebook reported that their team is working hard to restore the platforms.
The personal data of 1.5 billion Facebook users is for sale on the dark web, exposing them to a series of possible attacks, such as identity theft and account takeover. It is, perhaps, the most relevant data breach of the social network to date.
Hackers claim that they have names, emails, phone numbers, locations, gender, and the ID or unique identifier of millions of users. The data appears to be authentic and up-to-date, reported the Privacy Affairs medium this Monday, October 4.
The post adds a series of screenshots presenting an alleged offer of personal data of Facebook users on the dark web. These spaces can only be available by using anonymous networks, such as the Tor browser. Tor Browser does not appear in search engines such as Google.
A potential buyer would have quoted $ 5,000 for every million accounts on the social network. Therefore, the data set would be worth around $ 7.5 billion. Then, in a later post, the seller claims to represent a large company that works on “Facebook data scraping,” the note adds.
Coincidentally, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp collapsed on Monday worldwide. Facebook apps like Messenger and Facebook Workplace also don’t work, and the problem seems global.
Privacy Affairs subsequently reported that the timing of this news release and the Facebook outage constitutes an unfortunate coincidence that leads many users to assume a connection between the two.
The official Facebook account on Twitter reported that it was working to get everything back to normal as soon as possible.
It was until 5:30 p.m of that day that Facebook returned to report on social networks and apologized to users and companies worldwide that depend on the services of its platforms.
In addition, the platform asserted that the team in charge worked hard to reestablish access to the application services and announced that the platforms would work again.
However, even though the company reported that there would already be access to the platforms, it did not mean that they all worked well, especially in the web version of WhatsApp.
For their part, Facebook and Instagram are still struggling with some images and commenting on the publications. Although, in the case of the first, the problems in functions such as reactions and notifications persist.
Failures in the internet connection in the messaging app and the two social networks, and a common error of the massive failure included the message 5xx server error, indicated that when the server does not comply with the required requests, either due to an internal error, an invalid response, a bad link or temporary unavailability of the program.
By: Jenson Nuñez
