Hackers put up private information of 1.5 billion Facebook users for sale
The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a hackers forum.
This breach of privacy comes amid the global downtime being experienced by all Facebook-owned social media apps.
Privacy Affairs reports that data put up for sale includes the Facebook users’ names, emails, location, gender, phone number, user identification and other personal information.
The report noted that the hackers said the data was gotten by scraping instead of hacking or compromising individual users’ accounts.
Scraping is done when publicly available data is collected and organized into databases. As a result, hackers can make use of the collated information to carry out cyber attacks.
There has been a widely reported inability to access the services since Monday afternoon after a yet to be identified hacker nuked the DNS A; an address file that holds an IP address of the domain name and AAA records for Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.
This development comes as the social media giant is experiencing worldwide outages.
In an attempt to assure users that things are being fixed, Facebook has had to rely on Twitter to pass that information.
More from Peoples Gazette
Showbiz
Wizkid, Tems’ ‘Essence’ hits platinum
Recently released ‘Essence Remix’ featuring Tems and Justin Bieber is currently one of the most streamed African songs of this decade on Pandora.
World
Only one in five space industry workers are women: UN
The number of women employed in the international space industry represents just 20 to 22 per cent of the workforce, figures released by the UN show.
Politics
South-South governors launch own regional security outfit
On Monday, the South-South governors approved the establishment of a joint regional security outfit to address insecurity in their region.
World
IMF boss Georgieva to face panel over manipulated Doing Business report
“The executive board will also meet on the matter soon with the managing director as part of this process.”
Education
We want to be corpers, not corpses, say Abia students protesting bad road
Students of the Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike (MOUAU) in Abia embarked on a peaceful protest against the deplorable state of Umuahia-Ikot Ekpene road.
World
Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram back after global outage, blame technical issue
Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are back up after the global outage that kept users offline for almost six hours on Monday, blaming “internal technical issue.”
