BLOG: 100 million Facebook pages leaked to a torrent site

Skull Security's hacker/researcher Ron Bowes has assembled a 2.8GB torrent file containing account details of approximately 100 million Facebook users. That is almost 1 in 5 of the 500 million accounts the social networking giant has.

This torrent aggregates URLs of each account with other personal details contained in the profiles, such as email addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth. Mr. Bowes created a crawler to sweep through Facebook's directory, where all the information is kept and which has open access to anyone. As a gesture of 'good will' the researcher also included the programming code that he used to scan the directory list.

It's not illegal what Bowes has done, since we put our information out there on various Social Networks voluntarily for all to see. However there's still something hairy about the idea of someone putting our profiles on torrent.

Mr. Bowes said in he decided to compile the file with user information and share it with the world to emphasise “a scary privacy issue” with the way people share their information through Facebook.