Hacker Stolen 100 Million Facebook users

A hacker recently proved how easy it is collecting personal data through a lot of people using Facebook.

As quoted from the BBC website, a computer security expert named Ron Bowes, recently managed to collect personal data of hundreds to million users of Facebook, which opened to the public.

Bowes managed to collect personal data includes a user name, address and telephone number of the 100 million Facebook users, or about 1/5 of all Facebook users worldwide.

The list was compiled Bowes is the data that is not hidden by Facebook user. However, the list is uploaded on Pirate Bay, the web site to share the world’s largest file, so that its spread is very rapid.

Until now, there are already more than 1000 users who had downloaded a list of users’ personal information. However, Facebook seems to not really bother with the steps undertaken by the Bowes.

“Every person who uses Facebook having his own personal information and have the right to broadcast what they want, to whom they are promoting this, and when they are promoting this,” said Facebook told the BBC.

“In this case the information that has been approved for publication, compiled by a security expert (Ron Bowes-red) and the data also exist on Google, Bing, or other search engines, including also on Facebook,” Facebook adds.

So, according to Facebook, the data shown on the list are data that are freely accessible on the Internet. “There is no personal data is uprooted from Facebook.”

However, that should be a concern is that if Facebook users whose personal data is revealed, do not realize, because do not understand how to set privacy restrictions on Facebook.

Also, what was done by Ron Bowes, it is also only a preliminary step.

“So far, I only index Facebook users that can be searched. Next time I will also index the data of their friends,” Bowes said, quoted by TechCrunch.

If only the plan accomplished Bowes knows how many hundred million more user data to be exposed in public.