According to a report from Privacy Affairs, a hacker is selling the private information of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users. The data was purportedly stolen in a hack earlier this year and is nothing to do with the outage Facebook was suffering from on Monday.
The person claiming to have the data said the records were scraped from Facebook this year and that 100% of the records contain an email address and phone number. The user in question has received several requests for samples from others on the website and is giving away 100 records to those who ask to preview the data. Some of the people commenting on the thread have expressed doubts about the offer but the original poster has said they will submit a review once someone buys the data.
The fields which are included are email addresses, names, user IDs, location, gender, phone numbers, and cities. Luckily, no passwords were stolen but it should remind everyone to review their Facebook settings to ensure that their details are not public-facing as anyone can grab them and sell them.
Following the initial report, Privacy Affairs posted an update to the news stating that a forum user reported that they’d paid the seller but had not received the data in return, hopefully, it stays this way. As for the samples, these are said to hold genuine data.