A hacking forum is selling a database containing information on 533 million Facebook users.
The data, which was discovered on April 3 by Alon Gal, chief technology officer of Hudson Rock, was posted by a user called TomLiner on Raid Forums and is said to include user names, mobile phone numbers, gender, occupation, city, country, marital status, and in some cases email addresses.
Several websites, including Insider, have verified the validity of the data. According to Bleeping Computer, the database contains information and phone numbers for three of Facebook's founders: Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz.
The data supplied is not new and dates back to at least 2019. According to a statement provided to Reuters by Facebook, the data was "very old" and related to a problem that was resolved in August 2019. Rather than being hacked, the data seems to have been scraped from Facebook.
However, according to Gal, the vulnerability allowed hackers to access Facebook users' phone numbers and other personal details.
"It was severely under-reported and today the database became much more worrisome," Gal wrote.
According to some reports, the database is now available for free, but it's not quite that clear-cut. Users of the Raid Forum must pay eight credits, a type of currency on the forum worth $2.19, to gain access to the database. However, five pages into the same thread, another forum user provided free direct links to some of the data.
Raid Forums is often in the news since it has been a favorite dumping ground for the notorious hacking group ShinyHunters. ShinyHunters' most recent Raid Forum dumps include 1.9 million user records from photo editing service Pixlr and 2.28 million user records from dating site MeetMindful.
This isn't the first time this Facebook data has surfaced on the internet. The same database was first made available for purchase in May 2020, with access to the database made available through a Telegram bot in January. This database appears to be distinct from a database of 267 million Facebook users found online in December 2019.
