Telegram Bot Found Selling 500 Million Stolen Facebook Info for Just $20 Each

Urian B., Tech Times 25 January 2021, 09:01 pm

The phone numbers as well as the corresponding site IDs of about 500 million Facebook users have recently appeared to be for sale on a particular dark web cybercrime forum. The criminal or the group of criminals that are said to be responsible have now constructed a particular Telegram bot to act as a particular search function for the needed data.

There are potential buyers that can now use this particular bot in order to sift through the heap of data in order to find the phone numbers that actually correspond along with the user IDs or even vice versa along with the full information that is being unlocked after the interested party pays for the query "credits." Those particular credits start at a price of just $20 for one search then they get cheaper when bought in bulk.

The cybercrime activity was recently discovered by Alon Gal, the co-founder as well as the CTO of the particular cybersecurity firm known as Hudson Rock, who publicly posted about this particular scheme on his own Twitter account and was reported by Joseph Cox over at Motherboard in an article by Vice.

Facebook hacked account

A particularly unsecure Facebook server that contained account information of over millions of users now appears to be the main source for this particular data for sale. However, that particular vulnerability was already discovered by certain researchers back in 2019 and up to now and it was said that Facebook has since fixed it. Gal now claims that the particular vulnerability was exploited in order to create a certain database that contained the information of a whopping 533 million users coming from all across the countries.

For certain reasons that are unknown, the bot itself claims that it is only selling information from users coming from only 19 countries. Gal told Motherboard that it is now very worrying to be able to see a database of that massive size being sold around in cybercrime communities. It is said to harm everyone's privacy severly and will also certainly be used for either smishing and maybe other fraudulent activities done by bad actors.

Telegram and cyberscams

It was also stated that it is very important that the platform, Facebook, notifies its own users of this particular breach so that it will be less likely for them to fall victim to other different hacking as well as social engineering attempts. This story was reported by Gizmodo who reached out to Facebook but is yet to hear an update.

Telegram bots, which were initially created to be customizable, have now been increasingly involved with certain cyber scams. JJust recently, a certain report from ThreatPost found that bots were actually being leveraged in a certain scam-as-a-service scheme. This is where criminals would be able to automate their communications along with potential phishing victims.

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Written by Urian Buenconsejo