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.

Laws and Regulations

Sources

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/social-data-leak/