Slashdot Mirror
100 Million Facebook Pages Leaked On Torrent Site
Stoobalou writes "A directory containing personal details about more than 100 million Facebook users has surfaced on an Internet file-sharing site. The 2.8GB torrent was compiled by hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security, who created a web crawler program that harvested data on users contained in Facebook's open access directory, which lists all users who haven't bothered to change their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines."
No. This torrent contains: * The URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile * The name of every searchable Facebook user, both unique and by count (perfect for post-processing, datamining, etc) * Processed lists, including first names with count, last names with count, potential usernames with count, etc * The programs I used to generate everything
There's no patch for stupidity
http://www.skullsecurity.org/blogdata/fbdata.torrent
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
You're going to get a URL to pages. If the user has since made them inaccessible, you'll only get what you can from their public profile. Like, you cannot get to my friends list from my public profile. You'll get "potential" usernames to log into Facebook. Big deal. Remember when everyone could make a username for Facebook and that was also their profile URL? Well, now you can guess the most common names and add them to this list like david. Then you could use ncrack or whatever.
Not a whole lot in this file. Not like he scraped the pages of data and put that in a csv file for research or anything really interesting.
My work here is dung.
More likely it will precipitate a lawsuit. Why fix the problem when you can sue the pants off someone instead?
Sue for what? Violating Facebook's ToS?
I'm surprised TFA didn't link to the guy's blog. He has a good writeup there
http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/?p=887
The Torrent: http://www.skullsecurity.org/blogdata/fbdata.torrent
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Sensationalism - A manner of over-hyping events, being deliberately controversial, loud, self centred or acting to obtain attention. It is also a form of theatre.
Yep, that's pretty much it.
Just because he found the super-secret directory, http://www.facebook.com/directory/ and wrote a program that would read it. Of all the evil, nefarious things to do.
A leak is something that happens when previously hidden information is then made publicly available by someone on the inside.
The information here is available to anyone that wants it, someone just spent some time compiling the data, who had no affiliation with facebook.