Data Broker Exposes Millions Of Profiles
| Data Broker Exposes Millions Of Profiles | |
|---|---|
| Short Title | Nearly 235 Million Profiles Scrapped From Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube Were Exposed by a Data Broker |
| Location | Global |
| Date | August 2020 |
| Solove Harm | Increased Accessibility, Insecurity |
| Information | Identifying, Social Network, Physical Characteristics, Contact, Behavioral, Preference |
| Threat Actors | Social Data, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, YouTube LLC, Deep Social |
| Individuals | |
| Affected | Instagram Users, Facebook Users, TikTok Users |
| High Risk Groups | |
| Tangible Harms | |
Nearly 235 million of people's social media accounts were exposed in a bulk on the web. these accounts were scrapped by a data broker called Social Data.
Description
Social Data, a company that sells data on social media influencers to marketers, has exposed a database of nearly 235 million social media profiles on the web without a password or any other authentication required to access it. A cybersecurity research team uncovered three identical copies of the exposed data on August 1. Insecurity
The data included a wealth of information including names, contact info, personal info, images, and statistics about followers.
The profiles were scraped from publicly viewable social media pages on Google owned Youtube, TikTok, and Facebook owned Instagram. Web scraping is an automated task that copies data and information from web pages in bulk, all of the data is available freely to anyone with Internet access. This is an example of Increased Accessibility.
Evidence suggests that much of the data originally came from a now-defunct company Deep Social.
The information stored in this database is vulnerable to spam marketing and phishing campaigns.