The authorities of the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice seized the domain “weleakinfo.com” for selling sensitive information that was hacked from other sources for the past three years.
According to the official notice, published by the U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu of the District of Columbia and Special Agent in Charge Timothy M. Dunham of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, WeLeakInfo sold access data of more than 12 billion user records that included: names, usernames email addresses, phone numbers, and passwords for online accounts.
The notice also claimed that WeLeakInfo provided its users with a search engine to access the data that was illicitly obtained from over 10,000 data breaches. The U.S. Department of Justice urged the general public for help in finding the website’s owners.
The website was taken down after a joint operation by the FBI and authorities from Northern Ireland, including the U.K.’s National Crime Agency, the Netherlands’ National Police Corps, the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Earlier in the year, the FBI came up with a new surveillance proposal to monitor social media platforms for potential threats. As per the proposal, the FBI was asking third-party vendors to provide monitoring services, which might bring up possible conflicts with Facebook and other social media companies over privacy policies.
As per the new proposal, the FBI is asking third-party vendors to provide monitoring services, which might bring up possible conflicts with Facebook and other social media companies over privacy policies. It’s said that the new surveillance proposal by FBI would clash with Facebook’s privacy policies settlement, worth US$5 billion, with the U.S. government.
Security experts had opined that the FBI’s proposal would violate the companies’ ban against using their data for monitoring purposes.
