Facebook sues programmer who allegedly scraped data for 178 million users

J. Fingas@jonfingasOctober 23rd, 2021In this article: lawsuit, privateness, news, gear, chat, internet, messaging, Fb Messenger, security, Fb, social media, social networking, detailsMateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Photos/LightRocket through Getty Pictures

Facebook is having legal action in response to yet another massive-scale knowledge heist. According to The Report, the social network has sued Ukraine national Alexander Solonchenko for allegedly scraping knowledge for a lot more than 178 million end users. Solonchenko reportedly exploited Messenger’s make contact with import feature by making use of an automated resource that mimicked Android products. He fed Fb tens of millions of phone numbers and gathered facts anytime the website returned facts on accounts with phone quantities.

The attacker supposedly done the campaign in between January 2018 and September 2019 (when Fb shut down the importer), and started out advertising it on a black market forum in December 2020. Fb tracked Solonchenko down immediately after he utilized his discussion board username and speak to specifics for email and work boards. The gentleman has also scraped knowledge from other targets, Facebook explained, which include a major Ukranian lender.

In its criticism, Fb questioned for undefined damages as perfectly as bans avoiding Solonchenko from accessing Facebook or marketing its scraped info.

This just isn’t the most significant these kinds of incident. Hackers scraped knowledge for 533 million users by the same aspect. Even so, this illustrates Facebook’s willpower to crack down on info scraping — it can be prepared to go after attackers in civil court in hopes of discouraging identical details raiding strategies.

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