Millions of Facebook users data hits the Internet as a torrent
The Internet is buzzing with the news that a large file has made its way on to file sharing sites that contains information on over 100 million Facebook users, and the frightening part is that it was all collected from legal means.
A hacker named Ron Bowes of Skull Security is the talk of the Internet currently for exposing just how easy it is to collect data from popular social networking site Facebook. Mr. Bowes used a script of his own creation to compile a file that is 2.8 GBs in size, and contains data on over 100 million users of the site, or one in five users. He has now distributed it on BitTorrent, a popular peer-to-peer file sharing format, sites, and it is causing quite a stir.
The data contains user names and profile URLs, which will then allow people to access other data such as birth dates, names and other data, and then people can use that data to hop to the friends of those accounts.
Apparently users who have their accounts marked as private were not accessed, and perhaps this latest incident will prompt more users to review their privacy settings. The question is of course how many of the average, everyday users will ever be aware of this situation, let alone suddenly know how or why they should change their privacy settings.
Since all of the data was collected from publicly available data, there is no legal recourse evident at this time for users impacted, or for Facebook, at this time.
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