Selling Facebook Info, At $45 Per Thousand

Researchers with an Internet security firm have discovered a cyber-crook on an Internet fraud forum offering 1.5 million compromised Facebook accounts “for sale.”

The person writing on the forum offered the compromised accounts for $25 per 1,000 accounts with ten “friends” or less, and $45 per 1,000 for accounts with more than 10 “friends,” according to a report by eweek.com.

The information was found by researchers with Verisign's iDefense Labs on a fraud forum written in Russian, according to the eweek report. The information was posted by a hacker going by the name “kirllos.”

The compromised accounts reportedly for sale represent a bit less than one-half of one percent of all Facebook accounts — which now number about 400 million.

The compromised accounts do not contain enough personal information to allow for direct identity theft, according to the researchers. But they could be helpful to an identity thief who could use the information within the accounts to access other information and commit theft.

"Once you have the name and address and other profile-type information from a social networking site, you can use it to corroborate your way into debit card accounts and bank accounts through social engineering,” said Rick Howard, director of cyber-intelligence at iDefense. “You could also use these accounts as a platform to distribute malware through the friend system. Even as a security guy, I have to double and triple clutch when it comes to accepting friend invites from people that I do not know."

Facebook officials couldn’t say how many total Facebook accounts have been compromised, but company spokesman Andrew Noyes told eweek that "malicious actors are always attacking the site." Compromised users undergo a remediation process to reset their password and take other necessary steps to secure their accounts, he said.