100 Million Facebook Profiles Available in a Torrent File

Three days ago a 2.8GB torrent file of data from over 100 million Facebook accounts appeared online. The file was created by Hacker Ron Bowes from Skull Security with a crawler program he wrote. The information contained in this file was not hacked but just contained data that the owners of the Facebook accounts had made publicly available. By doing a normal search on Facebook a typical user would be able to find this information. Still, it is a little scary that someone had gathered and created a separate database with all this information. Recently Facebook has reached the 500 million user mark so just over 20% of publicly available user information was taken.

I notice today that the Skull Security website is down at the moment so either it is overloaded from people looking up information on the torrent file or, Facebook has had their legal team close the website down.

Another interesting point about this story is that Gizmondo found that IP addresses owned by over 60 major corporations were also downloading the file. I wonder what they want with this information? Of course, it may not be the corporation who wants to take a peek at the data but just a curious employee. Here is a partial list of companies who's networks were downloading the file according to Gizmondo:

• A.C. Nielsen
• Apple
• BBC
• Boeing
• Disney
• HBO
• HP
• IBM
• Sony
• Time Warner
• United Nations