The data scraping took place between the beginning of 2018 and the end of 2019.
The truth is that Facebook’s dwarfs do not stop growing. Now, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has filed a lawsuit against a Ukrainian programmer that would have stolen the data of an indecent number of users of the platform.
Apparently, according to The Record, Facebook has sued a certain Alexander Solonchenko for having carried out a scraping of data to more than 178 million users of Zuckerberg’s company, with the intention of get private information and then sell it on a black market forum. Solonchenko used a function that is part of Facebook Messenger, call Contact importer, to perform the aforementioned scraping of data. It is worth mentioning that, to this day, this functionality is no longer part of the platform.
Alexander Solonchenko would have collected the data of 178 million Facebook users
The function performed by the Contact Importer, when active, was to allow users to sync their contacts with the application to see which users had a Facebook account, and in this way to be able to link quickly and easily. Well, what Solonchenko supposedly did, between January 2018 and September 2019 (date the Messenger feature was removed), was use an automated tool to exploit the Contact Importer, and thus feed the servers of the social network with millions of phone numbers to be able to collect information from the accounts they had your number linked to your Facebook account.
All this led the Ukrainian to form a database composed of, as we have already said, more than 178 million users with all their data. As we have been able to know, thanks to the aforementioned medium, Alexander Solonchenko tried to sell all this data, ** managing to sell a quantity of them **, in December 2020 to a forum on cybercrime and stolen data market.
In 2020 it started selling the data on the black market
Later, ended up being tracked by Facebook, since the Ukrainian used your contact details and username in the forum mentioned above for email and other more routine things They steal the data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users.
In the lawsuit filed by the legal team of Mark Zuckerberg’s company, they would have requested indefinite damages and prohibit access to Solonchenko’s Facebook, logically, and the sale of all the data you would have collected.
It will be necessary to see how this case progresses for the company, since, at least, they seem determined to end, or at least punish, with this type of acts by some individuals without too much scruples.
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