Hacker Recycles Data on Half a Billion Facebook Users

A rich cache of data on some 533 million Facebook users was posted to a hacker forum over the weekend and is available to download for practically free. The information is from a data breach that occurred in 2019, but hasn’t been widely available until now. This is according to a report published by

The data was posted to an English-speaking cybercriminal forum called RaidForums by a hacker going by the handle TomLiner.

“The Facebook data was first listed for sale on RaidForums on June 6, 2020, but the initial sale allegedly asked users for US$30,000 in exchange for the data,” explained Ivan Righi, a cyber threat intelligence analyst with Digital Shadows, a San Francisco-based provider of digital risk protection solutions.

“TomLiner’s post exposed the data for eight forum tokens — approximately $2.52,” he told TechNewsWorld. “The data has been unlocked by close to 3,800 users, generating TomLiner over $9,500.”

Michael Isbitski, a technical evangelist with Salt Security, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of API security, added that at the time of that incident in 2019, Facebook indicated the data of 220 million users was scraped prior to the company restricting access in the platform to preserve users’ privacy.

“It’s plausible that this is partially the old data set resurfaced and combined with other scraped data sets since the number has now ballooned to 533 million users,” he told TechNewsWorld.