What is a half-billion amongst friends

On April 3, 2021, it was revealed that hackers were selling the personal data of over 500 million Facebook users (see link).

On April 9, 2021, it was revealed that hackers were selling the personal data of over 500 million LinkedIn users (see link).

In both cases, hackers appear to have scraped the data from the websites. And, in the LinkedIn case, the scraped data was then combined with data from other websites and companies to make a more complete profile, and it is that ability to create profiles based on publicly available information that can lead to identity theft.

Photo by 𝓴𝓘𝓡𝓚 𝕝𝔸𝕀 on Unsplash