According to a BBC, hackers appear to have found a way to steal the private messages of thousands of Facebook. 81,000 users, to be exact! Most of the affected accounts are from Russia and Ukraine, but some also come from the US, the UK, Brazil and other nations.
This revelation was first made by the BBC Russian service. Notorious hackers claim to have the details of around 120 million accounts. To steal the information, they used the well-known method of malicious desktop browser extension.
According to Facebook, one of the extensions used the activity of closely monitored users, collected the details and messages, and sent the information to hackers. Facebook claimed that the data theft was not the company's fault.
The incident was first highlighted in September, when a user named FBSaler posted a message on an online forum: “We are selling personal information of Facebook users. Our database includes 120 million accounts.”
After an investigation, security firm Digital Shadows confirmed that around 81,000 profiles contained private messages. It was also found that email addresses and phone numbers could have been extracted from another 176,000 accounts.
The BBC also contacted some Russian Facebook users and confirmed that the private messages were theirs.
While the data leak may not be solely Facebook's fault, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other data leaks that have been discovered, it certainly sounds like bad news for the company.
