Facebook hackers leak private messages of 81000 users: BBC report

New Delhi : Over past few months, Facebook has been in news for its illegal data leak. Yet again, the private messages of the Facebook users have been published, creating chaos in the online world. Hackers have got access to private messages of nearly 120 million Facebook accounts and already published such messages from 81,000 accounts for generating money, the BBC reported.

The report confirms that most users whose details have been hacked were based in Ukraine and Russia but some were also from the UK, US, Brazil and elsewhere.

"The hackers offered to sell access for 10 cents per account. However, their advert has since been taken offline," it added.

Officals from Facebook, however, responded that their systems were not breached as part of the hack."We have contacted browser-makers to ensure that known malicious extensions are no longer available to download in their stores," Guy Rose, Vice President of Product Management at Facebook, was quoted as saying.

"We have also contacted law enforcement and have worked with local authorities to remove the website that displayed information from Facebook accounts."

As a part of the investigation, the BBC Russian Service contacted five Russian Facebook users whose private messages had been uploaded and confirmed the posts were theirs.

"One example included photographs of a recent holiday, another was a chat about a recent Depeche Mode (British rock band) concert and a third included complaints about a son-in-law," the report said.

Recently, in October, Facebook admitted that in the biggest-ever security breach after Cambridge Analytica scandal, hackers broke into nearly 50 million users' accounts by stealing their "access tokens" or digital keys.

Besides, Rosen had said that Facebook fixed the vulnerability and reset the access tokens for a total of 90 million accounts, 50 million had access tokens stolen and 40 million that were subject to a "View As" look-up in 2017.

Facebook's lead privacy regulator, the Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has opened a formal investigation into this data breach that could result in a fine of $1.63 billion.

Conversely, the Digital Trends mention that the latest hack involves the use of browser extensions.

"It is always best to check which source an extension is coming from, and which permissions it is being granted access to," it said.