It was suggested that the hackers who gained accessed to 30 million Facebook accounts were not associated with a foreign state, the Journal said, citing people familiar with Facebook's internal investigation, the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported. Internal researchers believe that the people behind the attack are group of Facebook and Instagram spammers who present themselves as a "digital marketing company" who want to make money from deceptive advertisement. Facebook has so far declined to publicly comment on the identity of the hackers, saying that they will cooperate with the FBI as the reason for its silence.
The hack, which allowed attackers to steal 30 million of phone numbers and email addresses on Facebook in September. According to Facebook estimates that the hackers used 400,000 accounts under their control to steal access tokens of around 30 million Facebook users. Access tokens are used to log into Facebook accounts without typing in a password. They accessed basic contact information like names and contact details of 14 million accounts and additional information like birth date, recent search histories, relationship statuses and other vital information, 15 million just had their names and contact data breached while no information is accessed from the remaining one million users.
