235 million Instagram, TikTok & YouTube users' data exposed
The data of 235 million Instagram, TikTok and YouTube users has been exposed in a data leak. The data leak has been linked to a company named Deep Social. Its administrators then forwarded the disclosure to social media influencer data-marketing company Social Data which shut down the database after it was reported to them.
According to a security research team at Comparitech, 235 million users on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok had their data breached. The profiles were taken from the pages of social media platforms that were publicly viewable.
Forbes quoted from the report – “The data was spread across several datasets; the most significant being two coming in at just under 100 million each and containing profile records apparently scraped from Instagram. The third-largest was a dataset of some 42 million TikTok users, followed by just under 4 million YouTube user profiles.”
Security researcher Bob Diachenko, who leads Comparitech’s cybersecurity research team, uncovered three identical copies of the exposed data on August 1. The report suggests that one in five records contained either an email address or telephone number of the users, along with profile photos, profile names, account descriptions, number of followers and likes, full real names, etc.
The third-largest was a dataset of some 42 million TikTok users, followed by nearly 4 million YouTube user profiles.One in five records contained either a telephone number or email address of the users, along with profile name, full real name, profile photo, account description and number of followers and likes, etc.
"The information would probably be most valuable to spammers and cybercriminals running phishing campaigns," said Paul Bischoff, Editor at Comparitech.
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