Slashdot Mirror
Facebook's Black Markets Just Keystrokes Away, Researchers Say (nbcnews.com)
Facebook is connecting not only old friends, but also new criminals. Researchers uncovered more than 70 Facebook groups openly selling black-market cyberfraud services, some of which they say had been running for up to eight years. From a report: The now-removed groups had more than 385,000 members in total and offered a variety of illegal services, from credit card information and identity theft to website hacking and email phishing, according to cybersecurity researchers at Talos, the threat intelligence division for the technology company Cisco. By searching for a few well-known fraud terms, the researchers exposed a sizable online black market hiding in plain sight on the world's most popular social media site. "Selling CVV fresh $5" read one post for stolen credit card numbers. "100k mail list fresh" touted another from the "Professional Spammer's and Hacker's [sic]" page. Both posts included purported screenshots of their wares.
It's news because, with the proper filtering and monitoring in place, such groups could be detected very easily. Yes, I know, privacy and shit, but let's face it, once on Facebook, privacy is gone in an instant.
It's very hard to believe a large group of 385K members can fly under the radar for so long. This can't be explained as incompetence.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I'd rather that Facebook do nothing about such groups -- no filtering whatsoever -- but report anyone that uses it to the police immediately.
We won't catch the smarter ones that aren't doing this stuff in broad daylight, but I'm happy to catch anyone doing this stuff.