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.
hope this was just phishing and not brust force... (Score:1, Insightful)
wow that sucks.... *changes FB password just incase*
Immature nut (Score:1, Insightful)
Facebook is so passe, move on.
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Great PoE (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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:Play with fire (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FB has been quite liberal with users' privacy (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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:Can someone please tell me... (Score:3, Insightful)
...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...
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.
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.
Re:FB has been quite liberal with users' privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Translation (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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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..."
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Password Safe [sourceforge.net].
Re:Translation (Score:1, Insightful)
Using facebook is like getting a mug-shot for prison. You're all nicely recorded and on display.
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.