Personal Data of around 235 million social media users have been exposed by a company recently and that has led to the dumping of the data by hackers into the dark web.
‘Social Data’ is a company that sell data of social media users legally. They generally sell data of influence users to marketing companies. The company recently exposed those data without any password protection or authentication process, making the database easily accessible. Because of the company’s inefficient storage system, the hackers got their hands on the database.
The data of YouTube, Instagram, and Tiktok users have been exposed, according to a cyber-security team. Millions of user accounts from these three social media platforms were marked by the cybersecurity experts in undisclosed websites. There were three different IPv6 addresses that it was hosted at.
The data exposed include user names, account descriptions, registered names, what type of profile it is, advertisement or business-related. Apart from these, follower engagement statistics like the number of followers, follower growth rate, engagement rate, age, gender and location of the audience, likes, time of the last post, and even in some cases phone numbers and email ids too.
Personal information can be misused by hackers and different crimes from prank calls to brank frauds can be executed with the help of this database. The cyber security team looking into the matter has asked Deep Social, the data analytics to which the exposed database belongs, to fix security loopholes and Deep Social has acquainted Social Data about the same. Now it is to be seen whether the social media platforms take any firm action against Social Data and secure their users’ data more tightly.
The third biggest was an info set of approx. 42 million TikTok users, accompanied by just under 4 million YouTube user profiles.
