Facebook Inc housed dozens of cybercriminal groups that set up shop on the platform as online marketplaces to sell a variety of illegal services, such as stolen credit card information, account theft and spamming tools, a team of researchers found.
Cisco Systems Inc’s Talos security unit uncovered 74 groups with names like “Spam Professional” and “Facebook hack (Phishing)”, it said in a blog post published April 5. Those online marketplaces, which counted about 385,000 members, were quite easy to locate for anyone with a Facebook account, the group said. Once a person joined one such group, Facebook’s own algorithms would often suggest similar groups, making criminal hangouts easy to find, according to Talos.