The data of 1.5 billion Facebook users found for sale on the site of hacker

Days after tech giant Facebook and other companies faced a global outage lasting 6 hours, reports have surfaced declaring that the data of 1.5 billion Facebook users have been found for sale on a hacker forum. According to a report by TechRepublic privacy research firm Privacy Affairs has revealed that the personal data of over 1.5 billion users which includes names, email addresses, locations, genders, Facebook user ID information was found on a hacker forum recently.

The data has been obtained by the company by scraping as per Privacy Affairs. This means that the seller did not necessarily manage to have access to Facebook’s internal systems, but got the information by scraping publicly available data and organizing it into databases and lists. However, the breaking comes as a concern for a Facebook user's security. This could give hackers with clues to reset user passwords and gain access to more personal data.