A hacker named Ron Bowes from Skull Security has became popular recently with his creation of a 2GB torrent file which apparently contains around 100 million Facebook account users’ information. It has been published online and has been made available in a downloadable file.
Bowes created this web crawler program and collected personal data of a large number of Facebook users. This contains more than 100 million entries which is approximately 1/5 of the total Facebook users’ base.
Apparently, Bowes used a special code to be able to scan the more than 500 million Facebook profiles and search for information which is not hidden by privacy settings to come up with this file. Some who had learned about this file had it downloaded already so even if the Facebook user decides to change his privacy settings, those who have downloaded it might/have already accessed their information.
The file contains personal information about a Facebook user such as addresses, dates of birth, or even phone numbers. Although nothing was really illegal about this action done by Ron Bowes somehow it caused Facebook users to get worried.
With scammers and other cyber-criminals just waiting around the corner for a great opportunity to get their dirty jobs done, they might find this file quite interesting. And maybe this idea made a lot of Facebook users bothered knowing their personal information has been accessed.
You may visit www.skullsecurity.org, for more details about this downloadable file that Ron Bowes has created. Different opinions have been raised about it, some privacy experts have even expressed concerns as well since according to them majority of Facebook users are not even aware of such privacy settings in Facebook.
According to Simon Davies of Privacy International, Facebook must have anticipated the occurrence of such incident and made some preventive measures to prevent it from happening. On the other hand, Facebook did not find this incident alarming and assured everyone that the only users affected are the ones who haven’t made changes in their privacy settings.
Well, if you are a Facebook user and you don’t want to share any information about you to people you don’t know, just take advantage of the controls available in Facebook and make your information setting private so nobody might directly access it without your permission.
Updates: People who downloaded the torrent link said that the total Facebook accounts that were scraped weren’t only 100 million, but 170 million – Coming from each individual profiles. Certainly, it’s another busy day for Pirates again :D
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Tags: 100 Million Facebook Account Information downloaded in torrent, 100 Million Facebook Account Information leaked, facebook, social networking site
ALWAY keep in mind that nothing you put on the internet is ever really “private”.