1.5 billion Facebook users’ data on sale at Hacker Forum

Amid the global outage of Facebook along with its sister platforms Instagram and Whatsapp, the data of its over 1.5 Billion users are now being sold on the dark web.

Sputnik News reported that in late September, an announcement was posted on a hacking forum that claimed to have the name, email, phone number, location, gender, and user ID of 1.5 billion Facebook users. The report said the data are being sold on a Hacker Forum.

“One prospective buyer has allegedly been quoted at $5,000 per 1 million Facebook accounts.

“This would value the entire set of Facebook user data at $7.5 million. In a subsequent post, the seller alleges to represented a large company that works to scrape Facebook for data”.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline Monday evening, Nigerian time. The Facebook Inc said it was working to restore the platforms.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience”, Facebook said on Twitter.

Facebook has been accused of removing and shadow banning content that spoke either in favor of protesting Indian farmers or against Narendra Modi’s government.

Although Facebook’s rules state that it is “against the Facebook Community Standards to maintain more than one personal account,” Facebook avoids enforcing this rule; even when multiple personal accounts are reported for attention, they pass the investigation, and even Facebook users with less than 100 friend connections might see multiple instances among those 100 that must represent either friends with multiple personal accounts or imposters claiming to be those people.

On October 4, 2021, Facebook had its worse outage since 2008.