Don’t be fooled, there is no way that 1.5 billion Facebook users’ data is for sale on the web

During the last 6 hours, Facebook as well as WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus services simultaneously lost internet connection on a global scale. The fact that Facebook’s services simultaneously lost connection for many hours has caused many internet users to become worried, even panic when unable to connect with their acquaintances.

This also became an opportunity for conspiracy theories that the cause of this incident was a massive cyberattack targeting Facebook. Coincidentally, this incident took place shortly after Sunday night’s “60 Minutes,” in which a Facebook employee revealed that the company was deliberately misleading the public and the government about its efforts to restrict language. their hostility and disinformation. That makes people believe “strangled” about the theory that a cyber attack is taking place.

Not only that, the story has progressed to a higher level when it is said that this hack has resulted in the leak of 1.5 billion Facebook user data records and it is being sold on a forum specializing in hacking.

The people who spread this story also cite a September 22 post by a company called X2Emails that claims to have ” data on more than 1.5 billion Facebook users, which are collected collected this year, and 100% of them include email and phone numbers .” The post was quickly thought to be related to this Facebook incident.

But even the person selling the block of data it did not say, it was stolen from Facebook, instead it was only collected from this social network and included the information ” Email, gender, location of membership. street, phone number, name and UID .” This information is usually displayed by users on Facebook and its collection has nothing to do with hacking.

In addition, depending on your point of view, these data purchases often carry a risk of fraud. Another user did not trust the seller of this data.

” Fraudster. Only sent me data samples of 20 users. Nothing else. No middleman is allowed to testify. But he wants me to believe the data sample of only 20 users and demands deposit $5,000. Definitely not 1.5 billion users, I think only social activity data of about 150 users .”

It is not new for hackers to claim to be on forums like Raidforums to offer to buy blocks of data they collect – even though it can be viewed by anyone in fact – is nothing new. Almost every week there are such posts appearing on the forum. Sometimes there are hackers who post real data, and most of them are trying to cheat others for money.

In fact, in January of this year, multiple reports said a real incident at Facebook resulted in the leak of data on about 500 million accounts. This data includes the phone numbers of people who want to protect their accounts through a second layer of authentication. Two months later, someone posted this block of data for sale on a hacking forum.

As for the recent incident, many network experts believe that the problem stems from the internet infrastructure, especially with the DNS domain name management system and BGP routing. While DNS is like the address of a certain website on the internet, BGP is like a map showing how to get from your computer to that address. For some reason, both of these pieces of information disappeared in the recent incident, making it impossible for users to find their way to the web service that Facebook makes available to everyone.

Refer to Vice