Claims Facebook was HACKED appear online as personal data of over 1.5bn users ‘sold on forum’

CLAIMS Facebook was hacked have appeared online as it was alleged personal data of 1.5billion platform’s users’ has appeared on a hackers’ forum. 

If true, this would potentially allow cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target people across the globe.

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According to the data privacy website PrivacyAffairs, late last month a user of a known hacker forum posted an announcement claiming to possess the personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users.

The data was currently up for sale.

One prospective buyer claims to have been quoted $5,000 for the data of one million Facebook user accounts.

The data allegedly includes users’ name, email, location, gender, phone number and user ID. 

The allegations have emerged coincidently with the outage of Facebook and platforms it owns, Instagram and WhatsApp, although there is nothing to suggest the two are linked.

All three platforms, which are owned by Facebook, had been forced to confirm on its rival service Twitter to confirm to its users that they were working to fix the global outage.

Rumours had been circulating online that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have been hacked as one joker has mockingly placed the site up for sale for $1 billion.

Scott Helme, a cybersecurity expert, told the BBC the outage did not just affect Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

He said: “The impact of this is much wider than not being able to go on Facebook.

“We’ve also been to websites and seen things like the log in with Facebook button which currently doesn’t work.

“So, even completely unrelated services and websites are currently struggling because features that depend on Facebook are also not working.”

“It seems like somebody actually needs to go to the servers to fix this.”

He added: “It is not a particularly good look when you have to go to rival social media companies [like Twitter] to liaise.”

‘EPIC OUTAGE’

Meanwhile, a joker has shared a spoof ad on placing the domain up for sale for a relatively paltry $8billion with the words “inquiry now and Facebook could be yours”.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company, said: “This is epic. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. 

“The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.”

“This is epic… he last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour

Doug Madorydirector of internet analysis for Kentik Inc

Facebook’s only public comment so far was a tweet in which it acknowledged that some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app and that it was working on restoring access. 

Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it “feels like a snow day”.

But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook’s nearly three billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties to run businesses, connect with communities of affinity, log on to multiple other websites and even to order food.

In regards to the alleged data sale that was posted on the hackers’ forum, Jason Grosse, a Facebook company spokesperson, said: “We’re investigating this claim and have sent a takedown request to the forum that’s advertising the alleged data.”

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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk