Facebook data of 1.5 billion users was found for sale on hacker forum, now taken down

Scraping refers to getting hold of user information that is available publicly and then organising them into databases and lists. According to a research website, public data of 1.5 billion Facebook users was up for sale.

Publicly available data of 1.5 billion Facebook users was found on a hacker forum for sale, as per an online report. The development comes days after Facebook and its sister companies Instagram and WhatsApp went into almost a 7-hour long outage. However, the two incidents are unrelated. According to a privacy research company Privacy Affairs, the data which was found online for sale does not indicate that any hacker broke into the system, but was reportedly obtained by scraping data that was publicly available. The stolen data includes names, email addresses, locations, gender, phone numbers and Facebook User ID information.