Russian Hacker Selling 1.5M Facebook Accounts 193
Sir Codelot writes "A hacker who calls himself Kirllos has obtained and is now offering to sell 1.5 million Facebook IDs at astonishingly low prices — $25 per 1,000 IDs for users with fewer than 10 friends and $45 per 1,000 IDs for users with more than 10 friends. Looking at the numbers, Kirllos has stolen the IDs of one out of every 300 Facebook users. Quoting: 'VeriSign director of cyber intelligence Rick Howard told the New York Times that it appeared close to 700,000 had already been sold. Kirllos would have earned at least $25,000 from the scam. Howard told the newspaper that it was not apparent whether the accounts and passwords were legitimate, but a Russian underground hacking magazine reported it had tested some of Kirllos' previous samples and managed to get into people's accounts.'"
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at the numbers, Kirllos has stolen the IDs of one out of every 300 Facebook users.
Translation: it might not be a bad time to change your password if you use Facebook.
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Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: it might not be a bad time to change your password if you use Facebook.
Actually... what this means is that you should change your banking passwords.
Actually... what this means is that you shouldn't use the same password for more than one site. You should use an app that is encrypted and password protected to store all of your login info.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
Dude! Five digit ID. I am not losing my slashdot account!
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Ditto
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Right on, 5 digits and proud
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Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're too lazy to actually come up with unique passwords for each site and you happen to have OpenSSL installed (who doesn't?), you can automatically figure out all your passwords only having to remember one.
Come up with a base password, for the sake of argument let's say ABCDEF. For each site, append the name of the site to your base password. E.g., for Slashdot, it's ABCDEFslashdot. "echo ABCDEFslashdot | openssl sha1" yields your password of 040b6c2fb4d5858ad21810deb8e9ee2eb804e2a7. From that password it is intractable to determine what your base password was and hence what your other passwords are.
Some sites require special characters or, even worse, have maximum password lengths (which would suggest they're storing your password in plaintext, yikes). Fuck those sites.
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Slightly easier:
echo ABCDEFslashdot | sha1sum
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Password Safe [sourceforge.net].
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vim -x
Yup. Just don't keep the file open too long - Vim's swap files are not encrypted.
CJ
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Actually... what this means is that you should change your banking passwords.
Do any banks actually use ordinary password authentication? My bank has provided me with a Digipass, a small device with a numeric keypad, where I enter my PIN, select an authentication mode, input a challenge (a couple of randomly generated bank-provided numbers) and when confirming transfer orders, an amount. The device then displays a string of digits, which I enter into the bank login page. Using ordinary passwords seem pretty insecure in comparison.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
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The main reason being that they aren't generally held accountable for breaches that may occur due to their own lax security measures. In relative recent history it was still relatively common for ID thieves to be able to get
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
And charge a fee. Remember, in the financial industry, you're criminally stupid if you don't make money off the mistakes of those around you. That's American capitalism for you.
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The American financial industry was modeled on European banking practices. And then adopted back again by Europe.
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Corporations are under a legal and I would argue a moral obligation to optimize their owners return on investment.
Sure, but that does not preclude the fact that (in my opinion at least) banks are also under the moral obligation to keep their customers' money safe from unauthorized access. Customers have deposited their money in the bank because they trust that the bank will give them back (with interest) when they want them.
I don't see it as unreasonable that the government holds them to this moral responsibility, e.g. by declaring minimum security standards required. After all, the government decides who can be a bank
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I'll do you one better, a bank I had an account with wouldn't accept passwords with ~!@#$%^&*()_+/\?|`, etc, in them. Only ([a-zA-Z0-9]*) was allowed!
In the 21st century. Pretty fucking impressive.
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Westpac goes one step further, and requires between eight and twenty characters. Also case insensitive.
They also strongly discourage the use of software like Keepass.
Re:Banks here in Finland uses one-time codes (Score:2, Interesting)
Here in Finland, banks usually provide you with a list of ~50-100 one-time use codes, so it's basically impossible to figure out the next code unless you manage to find some pattern in the random digit generator that the banks use to generate those one-time codes. To me this seems even more secure than using those keypads that most other european countries seem to be using. The only way I can concieve this to be hacked is to figure out what someone's userid is (random generated string, i.e. basically a trad
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the only way I can conceive this to be hacked ...
Always a dangerous statement - just because you can't think of an attack doesn't mean there isn't one.
You are correct that no one is going to guess the next one-time password. Instead, they are going to attack your machine, and piggyback on your session after you have logged in. This is happening in the wild today, although it's mostly aimed at larger commercial accounts.
Those keypads are more secure because they can be used to enter unique data for
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Hmm, I use 5 banks on a regular basis. Carrying around 5 devices with me so I can check my bank accounts seems awfully inconvenient.
You already carry five of the six devices you'd need: five bank cards. The sixth device is a card reader.
Neither of the banks I use require me to use the card reader to log in, but both require it to actually do anything important (send money, etc).
I have two card readers (both banks sent me one) so I keep one at home and one at work.
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There are banks that allow you to log in with the same username/password auth system that sites like facebook use? If so, you should probably expect it to have been hacked ages ago.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
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Only if they can break the reCaptcha shown when you register a new account.
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Which has been already broken in OCR farms
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
As if you needed a password to get the data of a Facebook account...
Dude, just ask Zuckerberg nicely. You’re by far not the first one he sold account data out to.
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If I had mod points I would tag this as insightful.
I keep waiting for the inevitable Onion article for "Facebook CEO complains about unfair price competition from Russian hackers", except I wouldn't be too surprised to see it instead on the WSJ.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
If Facebook was concerned about the safety of their users, why not just go UPDATE users SET must_reset_password = 1; Throw a reCaptcha onto the reset page, too, so the "hacker" can't automate that process.
Of course there's a fatal flaw in my plan. "If Facebook was concerned about the safety of their users..."
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>Translation: it might not be a bad time to change your password if you use Facebook.
According to the article, the passwords are gleaned from malware installed on the user's machine. So even if you change your password, what is to prevent the same malware from sending the new password to this hacker guy and allowing him to resend the changed account info to his buyers?
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Am I safe? I have a six-character, alphanumeric password on facebook. But it's also my weakest password. I chose that one specifically because I don't trust FB, and didn't want to compromise my other passwords. Did they dictionary/brute force it, or did they get the passwds some other way?
(Not that I have any personal info stored on FB anyway...)
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Yes. Although the homepage isn't encrypted, the login&password are posted to https://login.facebook.com/login.php [facebook.com] (which then redirects to another unencrypted page).
I'll take them (Score:5, Funny)
I can increase the size of my friend network and be the biggest star on the net!
That's my chance... (Score:2, Funny)
NOOO! (Score:3, Funny)
What is going to happen to my beautiful farm :(
Great PoE (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great PoE (Score:4, Interesting)
The wonderful thing about his product though, is that he can keep selling it even after he has sold it.
He doesn't have 1.5 million accounts to sell once, he has 1.5 million accounts to sell over and over and over. He may only be able to get $50k for the lot, but he can sell them all a dozen times. Depending on if they catch him or not, and how effective they are at getting people to change their passwords (the only way to make the accounts worthless), this guy could make half a million dollars or more pretty easily.
Re:Great PoE (Score:4, Funny)
The wonderful thing about his product though, is that he can keep selling it even after he has sold it.
He doesn't have 1.5 million accounts to sell once, he has 1.5 million accounts to sell over and over and over. He may only be able to get $50k for the lot, but he can sell them all a dozen times. Depending on if they catch him or not, and how effective they are at getting people to change their passwords (the only way to make the accounts worthless), this guy could make half a million dollars or more pretty easily.
Not if I'm the first to buy them and change the passwords on the accounts....
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Go see your doctor, you appear to be suffering from a bout of hopeless optimism complicated with unwarranted faith in mankind.
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In other news, FB has slashed prices on IDs to their spamverstisers!
Re:Great PoE (Score:4, Funny)
Are you impugning the dignity of this entreprenuer? A man's word is his bond, and the most valuable asset he possesses. I'd be surprised if he isn't contacting legal counsel to initiate legal action against you for defamation of character as we speak!
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Don't forget the value of all the answers for to factor authentication as well. Lots of banking sites and stuff will after you enter your password/username pair correctly also ask you something like, what is your mothers maiden name, or What is your favorite kind of car, or what elementary school did you attend, etc etc. All things that someone with access to your facebook account might have a very good shot at knowing.
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Right and decent banking sites don't use those for password recovery questions. They use them for an additional check each time you logon; they usually have you answer a number of questions when you setup your online access and challenge you with one in a semi-random fashion using a window of time as the seed so an attacker can't just try again in hopes of getting a question he can answer right away; he will have to wait an hour or something.
They usually lock your account pretty quickly two or three tries
Koobface (Score:3, Informative)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20002112-83.html [cnet.com]
Play with fire (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the Facebook statistics page the average account has 130 friends. If 1 in 300 accounts are compromised and you have circa 130 friends then the odds are quite high that the personal data you have "only available to friends" is going to become available to some fairly unfriendly people shortly.
Reminds me of the evertrue saying 'play with fire and you'll get burnt'. I have always been mindful of the threat FB poses to my privacy and have completely closed down my account several times, but keep giving in and going back due to peer pressure from family & friends. This time I'm killing it off for sure. No organization, be it governmental or corporate should have control over so much of an individuals personal data.
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I'M SORRY ANONYMOUS COWARD, I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Nope, I'm just trying to emulate what was done on Tron and later revamped on Southpark. Stop being so fucking judgmental, you don't know me !
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"I'm sorry [NAME], I can't let you do that." is a reference to HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame.
Not get off my lawn!
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Facepalm ... I'll hand in my geek card in the morning.
Not get off my lawn!
Okay, I'll stay right here on your lawn.
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Re:Play with fire (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong! This is one of the biggest misconceptions people have. The true value isn't one's profile per se, but who one's "friends" are and the various interactions between them.
Unless your friends are all strangers who know little about you, your personal information is likely more exposed on Facebook than you realize. Often I see instances of a parent, sibling, in-laws, significant other, etc post personal details on one's Facebook wall, gallery, etc that are often visible to others on one's friend list, and even often to friends of friends too.
And that's not even getting into the issue of rogue friends, which can easily sneak in to gather information; among the value of stealing FB IDs ... it's not always about getting passwords, but rather collecting data for other uses, such as, spear-phishing / more targeted attacks - learning one's security questions they have setup on say a banking site.
Ron
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Maybe not outright but little details add up. Keeping track of said details could be a full time job with some FB addicts.
Good luck explaining why you defriended someone though.
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Exactly. Makes spear-phishing a cinch.
You mention closing down your FB account permanently. If so, be sure you delete everything out of it, including unfriending everyone, all public / private messages, gallery pictures, etc. If you've recently closed your account, just log back in and reactivate it (may be occur automatically), delete everything, and then delete the account again. And to ensure your FB account remains deleted, do not try logging into it for a month (FB says wait two weeks, but don't trust
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Uhmm, you keep going back and keep keying in real personal data?
Your Geek Card should be revoked.
I also have a FB account, with nothing in it. Well, nothing that is remotely true anyway.
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This time I'm killing it off for sure.
No you won't.
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Of course, the way facebook itself is headed odds are high that "only available to friends" data is already going to be available to everybody shortly. At least that's what facebook's retroactive TOS chan
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According to the Facebook statistics page the average account has 130 friends. If 1 in 300 accounts are compromised and you have circa 130 friends then the odds are quite high that the personal data you have "only available to friends" is going to become available to some fairly unfriendly people shortly.
Does anyone out there actually give complete and correct information to Facebook? I work with university students, and it's scary how much "private" information they put out there, just because there's a box for it on a FB web form. I'm an 83-year-old grandmother, at least as far as FB's data collection goes. A bunch of other [optional] stuff was left blank.
Although it is interesting that that 83-year-old went to the same high school and university that I did....
FB has been quite liberal with users' privacy (Score:5, Informative)
...and yet, time after time, FB users ignored the abuse and kept on using the service. I really have little sympathy for such blatant and above all, stubborn disrespect for one's own security. And for what? To have "virtual friends"? To "keep in touch"? Both friends, conversing and socializing are more fulfilling when done in some of the more traditional ways.
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Re:FB has been quite liberal with users' privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, I really despise these "High and mighty" posts about how all FB users are irresponsible idiots. There are a number of great uses for Facebook, and many of us actually PREFER to be contacted via facebook by our friends, rather than the endless deluge of phone calls and text messages. If you're having a get-together, I'd much rather you invite me on FB than tell me in person, because chances are, I'm going to forget. And I don't really see the point of the privacy crap either. I only put information on a social site that I'm comfortable sharing socially. I don't get it.
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I am on FB - but that's just so that I don't have to remember who is married to whom and all that. In fact, if you want, you can engage in more real social life with help of FB or any similar sites. One example - It's common to see Flickr users to arrange meet-ups.
It's not always A OR B.
Don't hate the players... (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook users aren't security experts, they're family members, friends and loved ones. You remember those, right?
Living in my IT bubble in San Diego it was easier for me to bag on Facebook and 'look down' on it's users but now that I'm unemployed and living temporarily with family I seen how useful it is for them to keep in touch with friends and relatives in a way that letters or email simply can't emulate.
Besides, if we really thought Facebook was that bad instead of bitching about it we'd be the talent pool responsible for creating a better alternative (unless you believe that only venture-funded MBAs can take on such a technological challenge). For instance, I've never liked any of the popular/available dating sites, so what do you think I'm doing while I learn Mongodb in my free time?
Re:FB has been quite liberal with users' privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
Like what? Email, so my messages can get lost in the sea of spam? Phoning, during the roughly 1 hour each day when both I and my overseas friends are awake and at home, and they're exhausted after a long day and I'm rushing to get off to work? Maybe I should just hop on a plane every weekend to meet people face to face -- I'm sure that would be a fulfilling use of my time and money!
Sorry, but services like Facebook fill an important gap that nothing else really caters for. If you don't like it, think of something better, but don't go round bashing it just because you personally have never moved out of your home town or made any friends who lived more than a street away.
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Looks like he got one of his Facebook buddies to mod down our disagreeing posts :o)
Re:FB has been quite liberal with users' privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a FB account. I have reestablished contact with old friends and very distant family members I didn't otherwise have contact with. The alternative to finding someone you have lost contact with (if your other close family and friends don't know where someone is or how to contact them) is by searching Google and hoping you find a reasonable match. Even then most sites that find a person for you want an idiotic amount of money and a buy in to their scam service to get the contact info. Then there isn't a guarantee that it is the right person or the contact info is still relevant.
People do use FB for more than asking someone to fertilize their crops or signing some mob-mentality world solving petition. It's possible to use social networking in a responsible manner. Facebook does seem to have a blatant disregard for their users and it's possible that a better service will come along and people will move to it. Another point condescending pedants might be missing is the exposure of security and privacy risks can help to educate people who might not otherwise even know about them. That is, just because people aren't using social networking doesn't make them any more safe on the internet. There were plenty of online scams and security risks before social networking; at least now people can communicate the nature of them and educate users how to safeguard themselves. One of the first things I did after seeing that CBS news story is post it on FB so that people could change their FB and email password info.
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People do use FB for more than asking someone to fertilize their crops...
Disgusting.
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Agreed. I've had a lot of fun catching up with high school friends I haven't seen or heard from in almost 25 years.
Would I have ever gone and found these people via a more traditional mechanism? Of course not.
Is it fun to chat with them, hear about who died, who had kids, and argue about politics? Yes.
Could I live without it? Yes.
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You are on Slasdot on Sunday, it's not like you have friends or social life, so stop pretending and get down from the high horse...
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When you have a newborn at home, you don't have time to go out much. Especially when the baby has colics.
But you're right: I don't have much of a social life at the moment. I definitely don't feel lonely, though!
Can someone please tell me... (Score:2)
Re:Can someone please tell me... (Score:5, Funny)
2. ???
3. profit!
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It's much bigger than spam. Thousands upon thousands of other websites will let you log in by using only your facebook credentials. It takes two clicks (easily automated). If you don't already have an account, it typically just creates one for you.
Now think about what those other websites might be.
Now think about what those websites do with information in order to sell you things.
Now think about what kind of information people would put on those other websites, knowing that "only facebook" has weird privacy
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...the use of owning 1000 Facebook IDs ? What is the idea ? Who would want it ? I may be dense but appart from spam senders I don't see the use of this.
You can make them all your friend to give you more power in Mafia Wars...
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...the use of owning 1000 Facebook IDs ? What is the idea ?
Apparently to try the usernames and passwords on banking sites as some users use the same for both. Plus I'd imagine there are ways you could use it to blackmail/extort people...
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Does it matter? (Score:2)
I am pretty sure Facebook was going to enable "post-on-behalf-of" for everyone on their next privacy settings revision anyway for extra fun.
"Hacker"? (Score:2)
Pff, I bet I can get those accounts for a couple of bucks, by just asking Zuckerberg.
After all, according to him, there is no privacy. Just make an app or something, and there you have the data.
Man am I happy that I deleted my Facebook account. (Which was, other than the friends list, completely empty anyway. But you know. Friends, photos, messages... that’s already too much.)
Use good unique passwords (Score:2)
To anyone who didn't get the message yet, there are three rules you should follow:
1) Never use the same password in more than one place.
2) Store the passwords somewhere safe.
3) Use good quality passwords.
Unix fans can generate good quality passwords with: /dev/random | cut -b9-
od -N4 -tx4
or slightly better ones with:
dd if=/dev/random count=6 bs=1 | uuencode -m - | tail -2 | head -1
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Fake accounts (Score:2)
i think he got me (Score:2, Interesting)
Why does Facebook know your Facebook password? (Score:3, Informative)
Facebook shouldn't be storing your Facebook passsword, just an hash of it. That's how login systems have worked for thirty years. Doesn't anybody there have a clue about security?
Maybe a bit harsh but... (Score:2, Informative)
...probably some people "deserve" the trouble they attract when using computers. Using an easy login/password combination is something it's not my problem. Maybe illiterate people have this problem, but then "what did they expect" of computers and internet usage? They pretend it to be like turning on a bulb. It works, it doesn't work. I would sincerely propose something like "computer usage credentials certificate". Someone is ALWAYS pretending "using computers is something anyone can do" (ha!)
No matter how
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Ah, cyber crime, the offence of sending ones and zeros down a wire to produce forbidden tones [youtube.com].
To specify, money in a bank is just an entry in a database. Someone fraudulently reduce some entry by $1000 and increase another by $1000? Roll back.
Banks have a problem with the administrative burden? Luckily, mine is owned substantially by the state now, so shouldn't be much of a problem enforcing this.
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Defending them? I'm just contextualising the problem.
To wit, cybercrimes cause precisely as much harm as your bank/government in your country wants them to cause. It's like spam: you could pretend that you can shut down all spammers across the world at source, or you could deploy education and effective antispam solutions to protect potential victims.
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What do you do when someone withdraws the $1000? It's then too late to roll back.
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No it isn't - it's just that the bank from which physical cash is withdrawn should end up with a net loss. Same thing would happen if I, as an Interweb merchant, sold goods to someone who had used a stolen CC - the $ would be deducted from my account and I'd have just given away free goods.
Cybercrime affecting some guy across the world and/or his local bank then becomes real theft by a Russian resident from a bank in Russia. Watch the Russian government suddenly take notice.
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No. Presumably, the user id / password pairs were acquired via security exploits in web browsers, plug-ins, etc. Not from Facebook itself.
While 1.5 million is a lot, it's still only a small fraction, as in less than 1/2 of 1 percent, of Facebook's user base.
Ron