Major corporations seen downloading the Facebook user profile information torrent

Updated on 30-Jul-2010

It seems as if Facebook was wrong about the importance of the information gleaned from 100 million Facebook users profiles by Ron Bowes when he hacked Facebook Directory…Everybody, not just other hackers and unwell-wishers, wants the data he made available as a torrent, including some very major organizations. Looks like their PR and marketing departments just had their jobs made a bit easier, getting access to 100 million indexed user profiles and corresponding information, all from a simple 2.8GB torrent download.

A list of the companies has been unveiled by a Gizmodo reader, who apparently used a program not unlike Peer Block to find and correlate the IP addresses downloading the file. Note however, it is quite possible that not every company in the list officially downloaded the file, but rather, it could have been someone, even an employee, sitting at their office, wanting to check out the torrent data for their own purposes.

This list is not independently verified…Check it out though, it’s interesting enough:

  • A.C. Nielsen
  • Agilent Technologies
  • Apple
  • AT&T – Possible Macrovision
  • Baker & McKenzie
  • BBC
  • Bertelsmann Media
  • Boeing
  • Church of Scientology
  • Cisco Systems
  • Cox Enterprises
  • Davis Polk & Wardwell
  • Deutsche Telekom
  • Disney
  • Duracell
  • Ernst & Young
  • Fujitsu
  • Goldman Sachs
  • Halliburton
  • HBO & Company
  • Hilton Hospitality
  • Hitachi
  • HP
  • IBM
  • Intel
  • Intuit
  • Levi Strauss & Co.
  • Lockheed-Martin Corp
  • Lucasfilm
  • Lucent
  • Lucent Technologies
  • Matsushita Electric Industrial Co
  • Mcafee
  • MetLife
  • Mitsubishi
  • Motorola
  • Northrop Grumman
  • Novell
  • Nvidia
  • O’Melveny & Myers
  • Oracle Corp
  • Pepsi Cola
  • Procter and Gamble
  • Random House
  • Raytheon
  • Road Runner RRWE
  • Seagate
  • Sega
  • Siemens AG
  • SONY CORPORATION
  • Sprint
  • Sun Microsystems
  • Symantec
  • The Hague
  • Time Warner Telecom
  • Turner Broadcasting system
  • Ubisoft Entertainment
  • Unisys
  • United Nations
  • Univision
  • USPS
  • Viacom
  • Vodafone
  • Wells Fargo
  • Xerox PARC

Abhinav Lal

https://plus.google.com/u/0/118371002657670425415/posts

Connect On :