Hackers and Facebook: No Proof Data of 1.5 Billion Users is Being Sold

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Hackers and Facebook: No Proof Data of 1.5 Billion Users is Being Sold

In her opening remarks at a Senate subcommittee listening to with a Fb whistle-blower on Tuesday, Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee produced a beautiful allegation.

“News broke yesterday that the private information of over 1.5 billion — that’s proper, 1.5 billion — Fb buyers is being sold on a hacking discussion board,” Ms. Blackburn, the subcommittee’s rating Republican member, explained. “That’s its most important information breach to day.”

The challenge is that the breach that Ms. Blackburn referenced is largely unverified, and probably faux. The assert will come from an nameless account on a discussion board that, in accordance to Vice, obtained obtain to the databases from a meant organization called “X2Email messages.” The nameless publish, from Sept. 22, promised “scraped” data on “more than 1.5b Databases of Facebook” consisting of users’ email addresses, spots, mobile phone quantities, and other figuring out details.

Some news shops documented on the breach as fact, but there is no evidence yet of a hack. Aric Toler, a researcher with Bellingcat, an investigative journalism team, pointed out that an individual claimed to have paid for the supposedly hacked information and located out that it was a fraud.

“Maybe it’s serious, but no reason to breathlessly report it like this,” he wrote.