Scammers Expose Facebook Data Haul of 13M Records
infosecurity-magazine.com
infosecurity-magazine.com
> the first group were tricked into handing over their account log-ins by a fake app promising to reveal who had recently visited their profile.
The claim of 13 million records also seems misleading. The article says they have 150-200K logins. The number of "records" seems to be a measure of rows multiplied by the number of data points (columns).
> Among the 5.5GB haul discovered by vpnMentor on September 21, was 150,000-200,000 Facebook usernames and passwords, and personal info including emails, names and phone numbers for hundreds of thousands who had fallen victim to a Bitcoin scam.
2. Facebook was not breached in the sense that is normally meant by that term.
3. You may assume that the "bitcoin scam" is untraceable and the scammers will get away because it used cryptocurrency. Not the case. They were spamming links to "bitcoin trading" platforms which accept deposits using credit cards and which are a modern reincarnation of "forex trading" scam platforms. The industry is mostly based out of Israel and uses the normal banking system and even accepts credit cards, as I mentioned. The only reason the criminals won't get caught is that no government will prioritize this.
In this case, the scammers failed to secure their own data, and researchers found the breach through unspecified means.