Breach of privacy! Data of 1.5 billion Facebook users found for sale on hacker forum

In a major breach of privacy, a research firm by the name 'Privacy Affairs' has revealed that the data of 1.5 billion Facebook users have been found for sale on a hacker forum. As per the research firm report, names, email addresses, locations, genders, phone numbers and Facebook User ID information was found on the forum recently.

However, the data found for sale doesn't indicate that the seller actually broke into Facebook's systems. Instead, Privacy Affairs said that the data was allegedly obtained by scraping publicly available data shared by Facebook users.

The fact that the data stolen for sale is publicly available doesn't make the matter less critical. The breach is still a concern for a Facebook user's security. Data stolen could give clues to a hacker to hack passwords, allow them to intercept one-time login codes, phish, send scam text messages and more. 

The latest reports suggest the post has been taken down from the hacker forum. Privacy Affairs said the data they examined from samples provided on the forums appears to be legitimate. The seller of the data claims their group has been in operation for at least the past four years and has served more than 18,000 clients at the time. 

Earlier in the week, Facebook and its sister companies faced a global outage lasting 6 hours which led to its CEO Mark Zuckerberg losing USD 7 billion and stocks of the Silicon Valley firm going down by nearly 5%.