Data of 235 million users of Facebook-owned Instagram, Google-owned Youtube and China-based company TikTok have been leaked. The massive Data leak of the user’s personal profile is now up for grabs on the Dark web.
The researchers from the pro-consumer website Comparitech says an Unsecured Database was behind this massive breach.
MORE INFO AND REASON BEHIND THE DATA LEAKED
“The data was spread across many datasets. And the most notable being two coming in at just under 100 million each and containing profile records that are scraped from Instagram,” says Forbes, quoting the security researchers.
The third massive dataset was of TikTok containing some 42 million data of users. And following TikTok, comes Youtube with 4 million user profiles.
Out of the five records, Telephone numbers or email address of the users were contained. And along with the full real name, profile name, profile photo, number of followers and likes and account description, etc.
“The information would probably be most valuable to cybercriminals running the phishing campaigns and the spammers,” said Paul Bischoff, editor at Comparitech.
“The fact that it was leaked in aggregate as a well-structured database makes it more valuable than each profile would be in isolation even though the data is publicly accessible,” Bischoff said.
According to the researchers, the data leaked of the users may be from a company called Deep Social that was banned by Facebook in 2018 after scrapping its user’s profile data.
STATEMENT FROM FACEBOOK
“It is a clear violation of our policies to scrap people’s information from Instagram. We once revoked Deep Social’s access to our platform in June 2018. We even sent a legal notice prohibiting any further data collection.” a Facebook spokesperson said.