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Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee made a striking claim in her keynote speech at a Senate subcommittee hearing on Tuesday with a Facebook informant.
“Yesterday, it was reported that more than 1.5 billion – that’s right, 1.5 billion – private data of Facebook users had been sold on a hacking forum,” said Ms. Blackburn, a senior Republican member of the subcommittee. “This is the biggest data breach to date.”
The problem is that the breach that Ms. Blackburn is talking about is largely unconfirmed and possibly fraudulent. The claim comes from an anonymous account on a forum, According to Vice, accessed the database from a so-called company called “X2Emails”. The September 22 anonymous post promised data “scraped” in “more than 1.5 billion Facebook Databases” consisting of users’ email addresses, locations, phone numbers and other identifying information.
Some news sources reported that the breach was real, but there is no evidence yet of a hack. Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group, noted that someone claimed to have paid for allegedly hacked information and learned that it was a scam.
“Maybe it’s true, but there’s no reason to report it that way, out of breath,” he wrote.
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