In 2019, attackers has exploited Facebook's contact importer feature to create a data leak of over
500 million user profiles, and this data leak includes user IDs, phone number, full names, date
of birth and sometimes email addresses.
Now, 500 million user profiles is around 20% of Facebook users, so there is a chance that you'll be
able to find someone's phone number in this data leak.
And you want to keep in mind that these data has been scraped in 2019, which means that all accounts
created after this date will not be included in this data leak.
Now, this data leak is publicly available for free.
And to download it, all you have to do is just to go to Google and then type Facebook data leak and
then GitHub hit enter, and then you want to click on the first link.
And here you will see that there is a user called David and he has published Facebook data leak.
So I'm going to click on this repository.
And here you will be able to find a link a magnet link that you can copy it and paste it in Utorrent
to download it.
Now this is how the information in the data leak looks like.
First of all, you have the phone number and then the user ID, first and last name, gender, residence,
birthplace, etc. and sometimes you'll be able to see the email address of this person.
And if you would like to search within this data leak you can use grip.
But in our case we are going to use Agent Transact because we are using windows.
And I think that it is one of the best programs to search in leak databases.
So let's download this database.
I'm going to copy this link and then I'm going to launch Utorrent that we have downloaded in the previous
lecture.
And now I'm going to go to torrent.
I'm going to disable this to not share this leak database because I've already downloaded but in your
case, after you copy the link, you want to go to Add Torrent and then add the link in here and then
say Add Torrent.
And in my case it's already downloaded.
So let me remove this and say Add torrent again, put the link and then say Add Torrent.
And now it's going to retrieve all the files within this database.
And you can see that there are many countries in here.
And I'm going to download it to my downloads and then say Add.
And now it's going to start downloading.
It's about 15GB.
In my case I've already downloaded and it is on my desktop.
So I'm going to stop the download process.
After you download the data leak you are going to get this folder.
You can open it.
And here you are going to see all the countries that includes user profiles.
So in our case I'm going to go to India.
So here is the folder I'm going to right click on it and extract all the content Then say extract.
In my case, I've already extracted.
So I'm going to say replace the files.
So after extracting the folder you are going to get two files in India folder.
And instead of opening each file and searching within this file I'm going to say right mouse click and
then show more options.
And then I'm going to click on Agent Ransack.
So this is going to launch Agent Ransack.
And the cool thing about this program is that it's going to search within these two files.
So I don't have to open each file and search manually.
So the next step is to add the user ID in this field.
And after we add the user ID of the user I'm going to click on start to search for the user ID within
these two files.
In a future section, I will show you how to gather information about a Facebook profile and how to
extract any profile user ID.
For now, I'll copy the user ID and then go to Agent Transact and put the user ID in here.
And then I'm going to say start.
And now the program will start searching for this user ID within these two files.
And as you can see we have got no match.
So this means that his user ID has not been found in this data leak.
So I'm going to show you a different example.
Here we have a Facebook profile of someone called Satyaraj who lives in the United States.
And I've already converted his username to user ID.
I'm going to copy his user ID and then I'm going to go to the leak database.
And since he is living in the USA, I'm going to extract USA.
And I've already done this.
Here is the folder I'm going to open it.
And here you'll see that we have eight files.
So I'm going to right mouse click and then show more options.
And then click on Agent Transact.
And you can see that it's looking within USA folder.
And I'm going to paste the user ID of Satyaraj who is living in the United States.
And then I'm going to click on start.
And now it's going to look for this user ID within this data leak.
So as you can see we have got the search result.
I'm going to blur it because I don't want to expose his phone number.
But I only wanted to show you a real life example on how you can use Agent Transact to search for data
within a leak database.
So in this lecture you have learned how can you download Facebook data leak and use Agent Transact to
search for data within this data leak?
This is going to be very important because this data leak includes huge number of phone numbers from
different countries.
And as we said before, a phone number is a unique identifier that only belongs to one person.
And we are going to learn how we can gather information about any phone number in a future section.