1.5 Billion Facebook Profiles Data Listed For Sale On Dark Web: Yesterday, Facebook suffered a critical outage mentioned in our earlier post in which all of its domains such as Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram were not accessible for over 8 hours. Sources have reported that Data of 1.5 Billion Facebook profiles was up for sale on the dark web and the domains themselves such as Facebook were also up for sale since they too contain immense amounts of valuable data points with personal information of FB users, business data and so much more.
Data of 1.5 Billion Users for Sale on Dark Web
The dark web is a part of the internet that can’t be accessed in the same way one would access the regular web. It has to be accessed in ways other than through common search engines in order to gain access to it. However, recently there have been many screenshots leaked showing just what sorts of things are being purchased and sold on this portion of the world wide web.
One screenshot showed how someone was selling 1.5 billion Facebook profiles. The sellers claimed to have “email, photo, name, LinkedIn…etc” amongst other bits of useful information bound together for this seemingly nefarious purpose. But who knows why these individuals are doing so, or how it could possibly be used by someone looking to acquire the information they need?
Recently a screenshot has been going viral on social media, claiming to show a listing of the domain “facebook.com” up for sale on a Dutch web hosting service. The site responsible for this prank is not a Dutch hosting provider but instead seems to be either from the UK or the US. Despite how convincing it may look, you should always perform background checks before doing business with unfamiliar organizations over the internet because even though your information might not be at risk here, it still pays to be careful!
Facebook said it was “already aware” of the app outage issue across Android devices and it would restore access to all of its websites. After being down for almost 9 hours, Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram returned to normal. News outlets confirmed that Facebook lost millions in revenue because of this incident.
What Can Be Leaked in Facebook Data Leak?
Most Facebook users had a momentary scare on Monday after some servers went down which meant that people couldn’t access their social media accounts. Facebook blamed the outage on changes made to its router, however, they say no one has accessed any user data. If users were concerned about their information being exposed due to this outage, it’s important to understand what information on Facebook might actually be exposed in the event of a breach or leak.
While we’ve not found any evidence of a data leak after the most recent Facebook outage, there have been troubles in the past. Social media accounts such as LinkedIn and Facebook have had horrific hacks over the last few years. Just today we read about hackers getting verified Twitter usernames and passwords via email.
What Does Facebook Collect From You?
Since we’re talking about all the things that can leak when your Facebook data is leaked, you should take a look at what kind of data Facebook has stored on you. As seen above in the screenshot from Facebook’s app privacy report, there are a few markers, identifiers, or actions that Facebook doesn’t track.
To maintain your privacy, Facebook collects your contact information, purchase history, location info, and other personal data that you potentially give away by installing the app. The app’s Terms of Service states that Facebook scans photos and messages you send via Messenger – which is unsettling, to say the least.
What Can Be Leaked in a Facebook Data Leak?
To start with, Facebook collects your phone number, email address, name, location, purchase history, the friend list of your friends on Facebook, and not just that, it scans all the correspondence you have had via Messenger. So basically, Facebook has one of the largest databases on user data ever.
It’s important to recognize that although we do use social media, we shouldn’t become too complacent and think that it can’t and won’t be used against us to make decisions for us. Yes, there has been a recent Facebook data breach in 2021 in which the Facebook ID, name, age, gender, phone number, location, relationship status, occupation, and email addresses of 1.5 billion users were compromised.
Why Was Facebook Down on October 4, 2021?
We have provided you with the complete detail in our previous article about What caused facebook down for more than 6 hours.
Facebook was down on October 4 2021 because of some configuration changes that went wrong. Facebook’s statement about the issue is simple: “We pushed some changes to our traffic management system, but something went wrong and we briefly served 30 million people using DNS lookup alone.” Put simply, Facebook accidentally pinged the world that it had no more servers running. The problem was further escalated because all of Facebook’s internal communications are also routed through one server.
It was reported, October 4th that Facebook has been having some internal technical issues to the point where they broke themselves down. So as people turned to Twitter and other external sources for information regarding Zuckerberg’s whereabouts, many different jokes about their fate popped up on the social media platform. “Forget Future, Zuckerberg’s Multiverse Is Already Down” is just one of those social media comments we came across. This gives us a demo of how creating airtight environments can backfire and be rather self-destructive in many ways or another.”
Download Your Facebook Data
You might notice that Facebook occasionally contacts you about various updates. You can ignore these updates, but sometimes doing so could cause you to stop seeing things like invites and tags on the website. One way to keep up with invitations is by downloading your Facebook data.
This will allow you to check what information they have stored about you. If there are issues, this will give you the ability to contact Facebook directly to ask for any changes that need to be made. We hope this short guide alleviates some of your concerns related specifically when it comes down to understanding how you can control your user data on social media!
Here is the tutorial about how you can download your Facebook data?
You might have noticed by now that every so often Facebook refreshes its Privacy Policy. There are some big changes, but it doesn’t really impact the information that Facebook knows about you. One thing you can do to get a clear idea of all that Facebook has on record for you is download your Data file by clicking the “Download a copy” button at the bottom of your General Account Settings page. It’ll give you an accurate picture of everything you’ve allowed Facebook to know about yourself during these past years using it as your source of social networking.
