Pirvate messages from 81,000 Facebook accounts were being sold

According to BBC, the contents of private messages of about 81,000 Facebook accounts were hacked this fall and were being sold online.

The breach was discovered in September after a hacker posted an advertisement on a forum about stolen data. These private messages content were stolen after a malicious browser extension was downloaded from users which stole the information from their accounts.

The hackers after obtaining the data were selling this private data online. The hackers told BBC that they have access to as many as 120 million Facebook accounts.

One of Facebook’s representatives told BBC that:

”

We have contacted browser-makers to ensure that known malicious extensions are no longer available to download in their stores”

After Facebook was notified about this breach, it reached out to law enforcement agencies to have the data removed from the platforms where it was published.

The accounts mainly belonged to Russia and Ukraine but there were some accounts belong to US, UK, and some other countries too.

This has been a very rough year for Facebook in terms of security and data breach as in the start of the year, there was the Cambridge Analytica Scandal followed by the hackers gaining access to the private information of nearly 30 million accounts through “View As” feature and now this, it indeed is a very rough year for the company

[Source: BBC]