The phone numbers (and corresponding site IDs) of about 500 million Facebook users now appear to be for sale on a dark forum about cybernetics.
The killer or group of criminals responsible built a Telegram bot to act as a data search function. Potential buyers can now use the bot to go through the data to find phone numbers that match the user IDs – or vice versa – the complete information being unlocked after paying the “credits” of the query. These credits start at $ 20 for a single search and be cheaper if purchased in bulk.
The activity was discovered by Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of the cyber security company Hudson Rock, who posted about the scheme on his Twitter account and reported by Joseph Cox, to the motherboard.
An insecure Facebook server that contains account information about millions of users appears to be the source of sales data here – although this vulnerability was discovered by researchers in 2019 and Facebook has fixed it ever since. Gal said the vulnerability was exploited to create “a database containing the information of 533 million users in all countries”. (For unknown reasons, the robot itself only claims to sell information to users in 19 countries.)
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“It is very worrying to see a database of that size sold in cybercrime communities, it seriously damages our privacy and will certainly be used for smoking and other fraudulent activities by bad actors.” Gal said Motherboard. “It is important that Facebook notifies its users of this violation, so that they are less likely to be victims of various hacking and social engineering attempts,” he added. We contacted Facebook for comments and we will update if we hear back.
Telegram robots, which were built to be customizable, have been increasingly involved in cyber scams, albeit in slightly different ways from this scenario. Recently, a report by researchers found that the robots were being leveraged in a scam as a service , in which criminals were able to automate communications with potential victims of phishing. Similarly, a Buzzfeed report a few years ago showed that robots were being used by Bitcoin scammers to lure victims into online pumping and storage shadow schemes.