The “misconfiguration” of the Chinese company SocialArks exposed more than 400GB of 214 million social media users | Instant News

More than 400GB of mixed private and public profile data provided by 214 million Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social media users from around the world have recently been exposed to the Internet. This even includes certain details of social media influencers and celebrities from the United States and elsewhere.

Social media user data breach

According to one ThreatPost articlesThe current leak stems from a misconfigured ElasticSearch database owned by SocialArks, a Chinese social media management company, which allegedly contains personally identifiable information or PII from Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and other platforms. Security detective researcher.

According to the researchers, during routine IP address checks on potentially insecure databases, even without password protection or simple encryption, the server is actually still publicly available. It contains 318 million records in total.

Chinese company hosted by Tencent

SocialArks’ own data management platform is dedicated to programmatic advertising and marketing. It also claims to be a special cross-border social media management company dedicated to solving some of the current problems in brand building, marketing and social customer management in China’s foreign trade industry.

It is said that the most affected server is hosted by Tencent and subdivided into certain indexes to be able to store data obtained from each social media source. This allows researchers to study the data more deeply.

Data leakage of millions of users

A kind Security Detective’s blog post Point out that their research team was able to determine the metrics of leaked data “scraped” from certain social media platforms. Then, it was also considered unethical and violated the terms of service of Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

It is said that a total of abandoned analyzers include approximately 11,651,162 Instagram profiles, 66,117,839 LinkedIn profiles, and even 81,551,567 Facebook profiles. There are also 55,300,000 Facebook files in the Facebook archives, which were deleted only a few hours after the previous open server was first discovered.

The public profile data includes some profile pictures, biographies, location settings, total number of followers, contact information, such as email and phone numbers, follower numbers, frequently used tags, number of comments, company names, and even employment positions and many more.

Please also read: Data privacy protection: how to view the data website obtained from you

Is social media safe?

Jack Mannimo, CEO of nVisium, issued a statement to ThreatPost stating that social media data captured for marketing purposes will inevitably contain a lot of sensitive information. It is also said that through the use of social media, for each specific privacy-conscious person. It is also said that more and more people are sharing some private details about their private lives publicly.

Someone later said that in order for people to protect themselves, public access to their personal data and social media assets should be restricted. They then said that people should be wise about what they post online and should be cautious about granting permission to certain applications that may abuse, abuse or even steal user information.

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Written by Urian Buenconsejo

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