Another shocking news on air!
Personal Information and Facebook pages of 100 million users are there for download on torrent site, courtesy of hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security.
These are result of Facebooks privacy scrutinized when we create pages with as open access directory and which can be viewed by simple search on search engines. But, there is no doubt that having them all in one place will be a godsend to anyone bent on data mining.
User names and profile page URLs are available in the torrent, and by following them personal information (address, birth date, phone numbers, etc.), friends and their picture can be be viewed. What’s more, friends of all those users that have opted to be non-searchable – can now be found by clicking through the profiles on the list.
To harvest all those pages, Bowes wrote a Ruby script that functions as a web crawler, and set it loose on the directory.
Hackers fashioned a torrent that contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, the name of every such user, some processed lists and the programs he used to generate everything, and leaked it on a torrent site.
A quick glance at the comments beneath the post will tell you immediately that there are quite a few ways of misusing this information. “Looks great as a dictionary for driving brute-force SSH/website attacks or similar. What’s the betting that there’s at least 10,000 users in that list whose password is some variation on their date of birth which, of course, they’ll publish too?” says in one, and I’m guessing he’s not the only one who thought of that.
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