News

Data of over 200 million Social Media Profiles got exposed in a massive Data Leak

Renowned social media data broker Bob Diachenko exposed the public-facing profiles of 235 million users through a misconfigured online database. The data broker collaborative with a firm known as Comparitech to uncover millions of copies of the data found online without authentication or password required to access.

In total, over 180 million user profiles were from Instagram, 40 million profiles from TikTok, and 4 million from YouTube. Each of the records possesses information such as profile names, profile pics, description of accounts, gender, age, real name, etc.

About one-fifth of profiles have either a phone number or the email address as per the report of Comparitech. Although the user information contained in this trove was all publicly available, social media giant like Facebook has threatened legal action in the past against automated data scraping firms that subsequently sell their connection to the marketer.

According to Comparitech, if the data got discovered, the trove could have been used by spammers, or to make follow-on phishing attacks more convincing. Although access to the database was closed within 3 hours of disclosure, it is still unclear as to how long it remained exposed online.

The expose data traced back to a firm known as Social Data which sells the user information on social media influencers to the marketers.

Furthermore, Comparitech also mentioned about the ‘evidence’ that was collected showed a link of data with the firm “Deep Social”. It is a company that left Facebook and Instagram marketing API once it was threatened by litigation in 2018.

Sponsored
Naima Rabbie

Share
Published by
Naima Rabbie

Recent Posts

First AI-Powered Teacher Launched in Pakistan’s Private School

Karachi: A private school in Karachi has unveiled Pakistan’s first AI-powered teacher, a groundbreaking move…

1 hour ago

Yahoo Surprises Users with Its Latest Android Launcher

Third-party apps have long been a staple of the Android ecosystem, but their appeal has…

2 hours ago

Phase-II Review of PTCL-Telenor Deal Finalized by CCP

ISLAMABAD: The Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) has completed its Phase-II review of Pakistan Telecommunication…

3 hours ago

Xiaomi’s SU7 Achieves New Production Record, Driving Q3 Growth

Xiaomi has shattered records by producing 100,000 vehicles in just 230 days. This is nearly…

4 hours ago

Teachers Can Now Access OpenAI’s Free AI Course

OpenAI, in collaboration with nonprofit organization Common Sense Media, announced on Wednesday the launch of…

5 hours ago

WhatsApp-Inspired Updates Under Testing in Google Messages

Google is exploring a revamped image-sharing interface in its Messages app, taking cues from WhatsApp…

5 hours ago