Seems like there's a (difficulty/physical file size)/(profit or effort)*(likelihood of success) score that matters in these things: a terabyte of credit card numbers (alone) would be 62.5 billion card numbers, but a terabyte of facebook chat messages/private pictures is some small fraction of data. It'd be much easier for O(20 mb) to move off the network than O(500 GB). The former can be profitably resold, while the latter requires a careful search to find high value data (e.g. pictures like the fappening, I guess?) and no foolproof profit mechanism. And the sheer size brings other problems like how to store it and how to exfiltrate it and deal with it without being noticed. And of course, if you ARE good at all of the above, why not give in to a chill life in SF instead of a "life of crime" and all the volatility/violence/cloak-and-dagger that goes with it?

Not saying a Facebook/Google data breach isn't terrifying -- it certainly is, and the privacy implications are indeed upsetting -- but the profitability path is just not as clear.

The "Russian propagandists" angle from the article is interesting, but seems a bit separate from the "FB has a shitload of data on people" problem. It's basically using the ad/social aspects of the service as designed: changing people's perspectives on something you want them to feel differently about. (Albeit aimed at a different target!) Not sure how to solve that problem.