1.5 Million Facebook Accounts Hacked, Sold

I was messing around the YahooTech section and I stumbled upon this article, and I thought I would share it with y'all. It is kind of like a continuance to Christine Kelemen's post "Dangers of Social Networking Sites" and EmilyH's post "Facebook launches new Safety Center." Apparently, the dangers are all too real and the new safety center did not work out. It appears that some Russian guy hacked into 1.5 Million people's facebook accounts and was selling them for $25 per 1,000 accounts with 10 friends or less, and $45 per 1,000 accounts with more than 10 friends. Talk about a "gold farmer," crazy huh. To me, that is one of the most interesting things I've learned in class so far: how some guy can make real money from sitting there and playing a computer game or designing stuff in second life. Furthermore, it seems like there are also people out there that do crazy things to make a fast buck as well, whether they steal stuff designed in second life like what professor taught us, or they hack your facebook account info and apparently sell it to malware people. It appears that's one of the things that the article said the Russian guy could do with the hacked facebook accounts: sell the info to the malware sites. And from reading Christine Kelemen's post "Dangers of Social Networking Sites" it would seem that if "they" get into one facebook account, they can also get all your friends' info off links from your account as well. I guess that's why the guy was charging more money for accounts "with more than 10 friends." I don't really know what's up with Facebook or how it works, b/c I don't actually have an account yet (don't judge me), so I can't get all technical with the details, but if you would like to check it out further, here is the link to the article (don't worry, it's a really short n' fast read): http://www.baspeople.com/1-5-million-facebook-accounts-hacked-sold/

Joshua Yost