Facebook Let Dozens of Cybercrime Groups Operate in Plain Sight

But researchers have found that the social media giant is also failing to police a far more basic and decades-old internet problem among its users: plain old cybercrime.

Researchers at Cisco's Talos security division on Friday revealed that they'd uncovered 74 Facebook groups devoted to the sale of stolen credit card data, identity info, spam lists, hacking tools, and other cybercrime commodities. The researchers say those groups sat in plain sight, with names like Spam Professional and Spammer and Hacker Professional, attracting 385,000 members in all.Anyone could find them with a site search for basic terms like "carding" or "CVVs," a reference to the security codes on the back of credit cards.

And finding the groups, Williams says, wasn't particularly difficult: Once Cisco's researchers identified a handful of them, Facebook's recommendation algorithm offered them other groups with similar black market focuses.

Last year, cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs identified a similar-sized crop of Facebook cybercrime groups, totaling 300,000 members, and reported them to Facebook. Facebook banned those groups at the time, but it took less than a year for an even larger population of fraudsters and hackers to make homes on the site.

"This requires a collective effortfrom Facebook, from users, and potentially from security companies like usto keep these actors off social media sites," he says.

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