Man who “scraped and sold 178 million users’ data” is sued by Facebook

From bitdefender.com

Facebook is suing a Ukrainian man for allegedly stealing the data of more than 178 million users, and then selling it on an underground cybercrime forum.

In a lawsuit filed by the social networking giant on Friday, Facebook claims that between January 2018 and September 2019 Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko exploited a vulnerability in a feature which was supposed to help you connect with friends on the social network to scoop up users’ personal data.

According to Facebook, Solonchenko – who sometimes uses the online handles “Solomame” or “Barak_Obama” – took advantage of a “feature” in Facebook Messenger’s Contact Importer that was supposed to tell users if contacts in their address book also had accounts on the site, and make it easier to connect.

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