Data on more than 1.5 billion Facebook users are being sold on the dark web.

The information include real names, phone numbers, and email addresses of users of the social networking portal, including those from Malaysia, which could be misused by unscrupulous parties.

Cybersecurity portal Privacy Affairs reported that the data was scraped from Facebook's public search results using automated tools, and had nothing to do with the global Facebook outage on October 4.

Although no hacking or data breach is involved, this episode, which is one of the biggest and most significant Facebook data dumps to date, could open exposed users to phishing attacks and attempts by unscrupulous actors to trick them into handing more personal information, reported the portal.

The latest dump is also reportedly unrelated to another Facebook data dump earlier this year, which involved 500 million users.

According to the report, a prospective buyer was quoted a price of $5,000 (RM20,895) by the sellers of this data dump for the data on one million accounts.

Perhaps it is best to recheck your Facebook settings to ensure you don't start getting unsolicited messages and emails.


Source: Privacy Affairs
Photo source: Forbes.com