Following the publication of a database containing more than 530 million user data, Facebook assured that it would implement new measures to counter the use of scraping, a set of techniques that consist to retrieve content from a website.

It is in this climate that the company has just announced that it has filed a complaint against a Ukrainian programmer who tried to sell the data of more than 178 million users.

According to the complaint filed by Facebook in a California court, Ukrainian programmer Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko, known on the dark web as Solomame and barak_obama, used an automated tool to collect data from 178 million users between January 2018 and September 2019. The data was available for sale on the RaidForums website from December 1, 2020.

Trapped by his job searches

Facebook claims that Solonchenko is one of the most active users on the forum.

There he tried to sell the stolen data to different companies on multiple occasions.

Among its feats of arms are the largest Ukrainian commercial bank, the largest Ukrainian delivery service and a French data analysis company.

Solonchenko was caught by Facebook after the company discovered that the programmer was using the same usernames and contact methods on different job search portals.

Facebook seeks compensation

The court documents published on CourtListener indicate that the scraping of data from Facebook servers was carried out thanks to the import function of Messenger contacts, which made it possible to find on the social network the accounts corresponding to the phone numbers in the address book of a smartphone.

Facebook removed this feature in September 2019 after detecting its abuse by numerous cybercriminals.

Facebook asked the judge to ban Solonchenko from accessing the social network and block the sale of data.

The company is also seeking compensation for damage caused in an undisclosed amount.

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