Crawler scarfs data from 1 in 5 Facebook users
2pnet view P2P | Advertising:- Your personal and private information is rock-solid safe with social advertising site Fa$ebook.
Right?
Well, um …
A 2.8-gig directory holding the personal details of more than one in five Facebook users has surfaced online, says Thinq.co.uk.
“Who forgot their security settings, then?” – it asks.
The torrent was compiled by Skull Security hacker Ron Bowes, “who created a web crawler program that harvested data on users contained in Facebook’s open access directory, which lists all users who haven’t bothered to change their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines”, says the story.
Bowes’ directory contains 171 million entries relating to more than 100 million individual users in Facebook’s “recently trumpeted half billion user base”, it says, stating >>>
The file contains user account names and a URL for each user’s profile page, from which details such as addresses, dates of birth or phone numbers can be accessed. Accessing a user’s page from the list will also enable you to click through to friends’ profiles — even if those friends have made themselves non-searchable.
There’s absolutely nothing illegal about what Bowes has done — the information is, after all, publicly available — but perhaps the existence of a stalker’s online black book might finally persuade less security-minded Facebook users to get their arses in gear.
Or they could follow the examples of hundreds of thousands of other former Fa$ebook users and just delete their accounts — although there’s no guarantee that’d be the last they’d hear from Zuckerberg and his crew.
Meanwhile, “Although initially the sheer size of the data is impressive, it does not actually illustrate a failure by the social networking site”, says H-Online, adding:
“This is in contrast to a similar case involving SchülerVZ, from which, it was announced in October 2009, a million sets of data had been siphoned off. Unlike Facebook, SchülerVZ does not have public profiles, and that attack originated from within the network. Every Facebook user should, however, be aware that Facebook makes their public profile accessible to anyone, unless they take steps to prevent it.”
(Cheers, Marc)
… and identi.ca
Thinq.co.uk – 100 million Facebook pages leaked on torrent site, July 28, 2010
former Fa$ebook users – How to delete ALL your Facebook data, June 1, 2010
no guarantee – Dear Jon: PLEASE re-join Facebook!, July 22, 2010
H-Online – Facebook crawler collects more than 170 million data sets, July 28, 2010
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
July 28th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
So basically using the whole “6 degrees of seperation” concept (or however many degrees it is now), you could basically find anybody (on facebook). Scary.
July 31st, 2010 at 12:56 pm
there’s a torrent for it over at TPB
4000+ seeds on it
might grab it later, just out of curiosity