Pierluigi Paganini
April 20, 2020
Hackers are offering for sale over 267 million Facebook profiles for £500 ($623) on dark web sites and hacker forums, the archive doesn’t include passwords.
Early March, the security expert Bob Diachenko uncovered an Elasticsearch cluster containing more than 267 million Facebook user IDs, phone numbers, and names. The archive was left exposed online for anyone to access without authentication.
According to Diachenko, the data is the result of an illegal scraping activity by abusing Facebook API to collect the huge trove of data.
A few days later, a second server was exposed by what appears to be the same criminal group from Vietnam. The data on this server is identical to the first one, but they also include an additional 42 million records.
“The second server exposed in March 2020 contained the same 267 million records as the previous one, plus an additional 42 million records. It was hosted on a US Elasticsearch server. 25 million of those records contained similar information: Facebook IDs, phone numbers, and usernames.” reads a post published by Comparitech who helped the experts.
“16.8 million of the new records contained even more info, including Facebook ID, Phone number, Profile details, Email addresses, and some other personal details”
Most of the records belong to users from the United States, and according to Diachenko all of them seem to be valid.
Now experts from Cyble discovered the sale on the dark web and purchased the database to verify the data. Then the experts added the records to their data breach notification service http://AmIbreached.com.
“One of the threat actors have dropped an online bomb by dropping the identities of 267 Million Facebook Users for 500 Euros — the details include their EMAIL, FNAME, LNAME, PHONE, FACEBOOK ID, LAST CONNECTION, STATUS, AGE.” reads the post published by Cyble on Medium.
“Cyble researchers executed the sale and were able to download and verify the data. The impacted users will be able to verify this on Cyble’s data breach monitoring platform, AmIbreached.com shortly.“
Threat actors could use data included in the archive to launch phishing campaigns or SMS phishing attacks against some users and trick them into revealing their passwords.
Cyble recommends users to be vigilant on unsolicited emails and text messages.
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