REPORTING FACEBOOK HACKING UPDATE
Update (, 12:35 p.m.): Added response from a Facebook spokesperson. It is currently believed the data was obtained by scraping publicly available information. Internet analyst Doug Madory said that Facebook's issues might have stemmed from Domain Name System route withdrawals, preventing browsers from properly translating web addresses into IP addresses.Ĭorrection (, 7:30 p.m.): An earlier version of this story's headline referred to a hack, however, this has not been confirmed. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience." "We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Facebook said on its official Twitter account. A cloned account is a copy, that uses your profile photo and other public information to trick your friends into. Users around the world began reporting their inability to access the services early on Monday. Facebook account cloning is a simple scam but it’s easy to be fooled by it. This latest alleged hack comes around the same time that Facebook and its subsidiary platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, suffered a sustained outage.
REPORTING FACEBOOK HACKING PASSWORD
The information was found to be legitimate by outlets like Business Insider, who used Facebook's password reset feature to partially confirm the phone numbers associated with certain emails.
Grosse also directed Newsweek to other reports highlighting the probability that the "leak" was actually a scam. "We're investigating this claim and have sent a takedown request to the forum that's advertising the alleged data," Jason Grosse, a Facebook company spokesperson, told Newsweek in a statement. This could indicate that the alleged leak was, in fact, a scam, or that the alleged holder of the data was running late. However, several users on the forum reported that they had not received anything after sending money to the original poster. The hacker claimed to be in charge of a four-year-old data scraping operation with 18,000 clients. The outlet also checked the information against previous leaks and found that alleged info was a legitimately new leak, not old data being resold. Samples shared by the user appear to have been authentic, according to Privacy Affairs. media coverage and significant reporting of its legal troubles and the outsize. Above is a Facebook logo seen on a smartphone screen. You can easily hack facebook accounts too by using our web-based hacking. In its annus horribilis, Facebook has suffered an attack that not only gives anyone considering leaving the social network another reason to jump ship, but that's also irrevocably tarnished the trust between internet denizens and the companies they rely on to keep their online lives private.Īs one cryptography expert put it on Twitter, this was a genuine internet catastrophe.The data of 1.5 billion Facebook users may have been leaked. Should Facebook's rivals be trusted with people's online security too? This week's breach would suggest perhaps not. A vast number of people have trusted Facebook would be able to keep their login information safe, just as they do with Google and other tech providers. Given the keys allowed the hacker to take over any account using a Facebook login, the real number of affected individuals is likely far higher than 50 million.
What’s most worrying of all, though, is what the hack has proven: that a company with the resources and power of Facebook can be robbed of keys that allow access to millions of accounts across the web. “It's very technically impressive to pull this off.” According to Shadwell, it would’ve taken significant skill to carry it out.
“As for scale, well, there's not really any interaction of the target required, so it's not particularly difficult to automate,” Shadwell added.įacebook hasn’t said just how many accounts were hacked, where victims were based or who was behind the attack. The attackers wouldn’t have found it difficult to spin up the basic premise of that hack into something massive, affecting millions of accounts.