100 million Facebook users details free to download

A large and interesting Facebook users database was made available for download a few days ago. The “awesome” list contains names, profile addresses and the unique ID numbers of 20% of the Facebook networks total number of users. This 100 million collection of user URLs doesn’t scare Facebook which stated for BBC news that “no private data is available or has been compromised” and defending themselves that the information was already publicly accessible on the internet .

“In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook.”

Although Simon Davies from Privacy International warned the social network about the imminence of such an attack facebook didn’t take any measure.

The negligence was also fed by a large majority of users who at the beginning of this  year complained about the complexity of Facebooks privacy setting.

Despite the fact that this “ethical attack” conducted by Ron Bowes a Canadian security consultant did not resulted in revealing personal information such as postal addresses , email addresses or phone numbers, it cold be a big encouragement for those with more malicious thoughts to test Facebooks security flaws for criminal purpose.

Source : BBC