171 million Facebook users info leaked
July 29th, 2010 - 8:12 pm ICT by Aishwarya Bhatt
New York, July 29 (THAINDIAN NEWS) A hacker at the Skull Security - Ron Bowes has managed to compile a list of 171 million Facebook users information onto his website. The compiled list is a whooping 2.8 gigabyte file.
The list which includes phone numbers, URLs and e-mail addresses and it was made available for download on the Bowes website. The interesting fact is that the list is not illegal because the data is made public by default by Facebook. What this means is that the list could be obtained by anyone.
However if you have changed your privacy settings to private, there is a chance your information is not among the data that was captured by the hacker. According to the information available on the leak, the hacker managed to get access to the information after it used web crawler software to phish the information from Facebook’s open access directory.
Facebook is under intense pressure to change its privacy policy. Until now, Facebook has maintained that the issue of privacy should be left to the user to handle but considering events that has happened previously, it is clear that Facebook might not be able to hold on to that policy for much longer.
- Facebook users on IE get a request to download the gzip_detect.php file - Aug 13, 2010
- Man who harvested data of 100m Facebook users speaks out - Jul 30, 2010
- Another Facebook Information Leak Raises Concern Over Security Policy - Jul 29, 2010
- Profiles of 100 mn Facebook users leaked online - Jul 29, 2010
- 500 Million Facebook Profiles: Exactly What User Info Was Leaked? - Jul 29, 2010
- 100m Facebook users' personal info published online - Jul 29, 2010
- Personal Info Of 100 Million Facebook Users Leaked, Accumulated And Printed Online - Jul 29, 2010
- Firewalls can help hackers break into Facebook, Twitter - May 22, 2012
- Facebook stops 600,000 hacking attempts daily - Oct 29, 2011
- EU to impose law to save privacy of social network users - Mar 17, 2011
- Content screening: Facebook, others to reply in 15 days (Second Lead) - Feb 06, 2012
- Internet firms spy on personal texts sent on smartphones - Feb 26, 2012
- Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page hacked - Jan 26, 2011
- Google now restricts Facebook access to Gmail contacts - Nov 06, 2010
- Facebook bug that allows personal data access, phishing repaired - Feb 06, 2011
Tags: e mail addresses, facebook, hacker, intense pressure, interesting fact, open access, phish, phone numbers, privacy settings, skull, urls, web crawler, what this means