The earpiece numbers ( and corresponding website Idaho ) of some 500 million Facebook users now appear to be for cut-rate sale on a drear web cybercrime forum .
The criminal or grouping of criminals responsible have constructed a Telegram bot to act as a search function for the data . Potential buyers can now use the bot to sift through the data to feel sound numbers that correspond to user IDs — or vice versa — with the full information being unbarred after pay for interrogation “ credits . ” Those credits start at $ 20 for a single lookup and get cheap if buy in mass .
The activity was find by Alon Gal , co - founding father and CTO of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock , who post about the schemeon his Twitter story , and cover by Joseph Cox , at Motherboard .
Photo: THOMAS SAMSON/AFP (Getty Images)
An insecure Facebook server containing report data on millions of user is likely the source of the data for sale here — though that vulnerability was discovered by researchers in 2019 and Facebook has since secure it . Gal has claimed that the vulnerability was exploited to make “ a database turn back the information 533 m users across all countries . ” ( For reasons unknown , the bot itself only claims to trade information for users in 19 countries . )
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1349671417625931778
“ It is very worrying to see a database of that sizing being sold in cybercrime community , it harms our privacy sternly and will sure be used for smishing and other deceitful activity by bad actors,”Gal narrate Motherboard . “ It is important that Facebook notify its users of this breach so they are less likely to fall victim to dissimilar hacking and social engineering attempts , ” he bring . We ’ve achieve out to Facebook for comment and will update if we hear back .
Telegram bots , whichwere built to be customizable , have increasingly been involved in cyber scams , albeit in slenderly different way than this scenario . Just recently , a reputation from researchers see that bot werebeing leverage in a scam - as - a - servicescheme , wherein criminals were able to automatize communication with potential phishing victims . likewise , a Buzzfeed theme from several age ago record that the bot werebeing used by Bitcoin scammersto come-on victim into louche online pump and floor scheme .
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