Facebook Hosting 100+ Cybercriminal Groups

So, you thought the Facebook scandal regarding Cambridge Analytica scraping tens of millions of users’ data was bad enough. Now, respected investigative journalist Brian Krebs has recently revealed that Facebook has been hosting more than 100 cybercriminal/scammer groups with members numbering in the hundreds of thousands:

Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network’s platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady activities, including spamming, wire fraud, account takeovers, phony tax refunds, 419 scams, denial-of-service attack-for-hire services and botnet creation tools. The average age of these groups on Facebook’s platform was two years.

My research centered on groups whose singular focus was promoting all manner of cyber fraud, but most especially those engaged in identity theft, spamming, account takeovers and credit card fraud. Virtually all of these groups advertised their intent by stating well-known terms of fraud in their group names, such as “botnet helpdesk,” “spamming,” “carding” (referring to credit card fraud), “DDoS” (distributed denial-of-service attacks), “tax refund fraud,” and account takeovers.

Each of these closed groups solicited new members to engage in a variety of shady activities. Some had existed on Facebook for up to nine years; approximately ten percent of them had plied their trade on the social network for more than four years.

• Read Brian’s enlightening article in full here: Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups Had 300,000 Members

Now, I realize Brian Krebs is an experienced security expert and highly effective investigator BUT, if someone outside of Facebook can identify more than 100 cybercriminal/scammer groups being hosted on the popular social media platform (some for up to 9 years), SURELY it would be (should be?) even easier for someone inside Facebook to have done the same. Shame on you Facebook!

Jim

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