Facebook Hack Reportedly Leaves Private Messages From 81,000 Accounts Up For Sale

Facebook is the most popular social network out there, and seemingly the one with the most privacy issues. Last month a data breach impacted as many as 90 million user accounts with Facebook eventually claiming about 30 million accounts had been affected. Another security breach was announced in September with that breach affecting over 50 million users; a tool was offered to allow Facebook users to determine if their account was hacked. A new report has now surfaced that claims the private messages from 81,000 hacked Facebook accounts are for sale.

Word of the hack surfaced from the perpetrators with BBC reporting that the BBC Russian Service was told by the hackers that they had details from a total of 120 million Facebook accounts. These hackers said they are trying to sell the information, but offered no proof of any sort that they had the data. BBC reports that Facebook has claimed that its security hasn't been compromised.

Facebook went on to state that the stolen messages had probably been obtained by the hackers via malicious browser extensions. The compromised user data is predominately from Facebook users in Ukraine and Russia. Hackers are attempting to get 10 cents per account, but reports indicate that the ad to sell the data has been taken offline; whether that means the information has been sold is unknown.

Some cybersecurity experts reportedly believe that if rogue browser extensions are the cause of this security leak, that browser makers might be on the hook for some responsibility for not catching the nefarious extensions before allowing them on their stores. Facebook has offered no insight on which extensions it believes caused the leak of data in this instance but says this leak wasn't its fault.

The BBC went so far as to contact the people selling the allegedly hacked accounts and were told that of the 120 million accounts they had data on, 2.7 million of them were Russia. The hackers also allege that none of the data they have was the result of the Cambridge Analytica breach or the breach Facebook announced in September. Some security researchers doubt the number of accounts the hackers claim to have data from because the researchers feel Facebook would have noticed such a large breach.