Security researchers have discovered an online exposed knowledge base that comes from the social media profiles of approximately 235 million Instagram, TikTok and YouTube users.
For those unfamiliar with this practice, Internet scraping is an automated strategy that is used to collect knowledge from Internet sites that is used through analytics corporations that use it to create giant knowledge bases of user information. While this practice is legal, it is strictly prohibited through social media corporations because it jeopardizes the privacy of its users and their knowledge.
Comparitech’s lead researcher, Bob Diachenko, discovered 3 equal copies of the online database in early August. After reviewing the database, Diachenko and his team learned that it belonged to a company called Deep Social that had closed its operations.
When the team contacted the now-defunct company, their application was sent to a Hong Kong-based company called Social Data. Although Social Data denied having any connection to Deep Social, the company declared the breach and was able to protect the exposed database with a password.
In an email to Diachenko included in The Comparitech blog post on the subject, Social Data attempted to protect the practice from Internet scraping while pointing out that the database, which was left online without a password to protect it, was not hacked, saying:
“Note that the negative connotation that the hacked knowledge implies that the data was surreptitiously received. This is simply not true, all knowledge should be available to ALL PEOPLE with access to the web. I’d appreciate it if you’d make sure it’s clear. Anyone can phish or tap anyone who says the phone and email in the description of their social media profile in the same way, even without the knowledge base lifestyle. Social networks themselves disclose knowledge to third parties, that is their task, to open networks and public profiles. Users who do not wish to provide data return to their personal accounts. »
Diachenko and his team found 3 equal copies of the database that were hosted in 3 separate IPV6 addresses. Of the nearly 235 million social media profiles in the database, 191 million were extracted from Instagram, four2 million from TikTok and nearly four million From YouTube.
Each of the entries in the knowledge base comprises a lot of data about the users whose knowledge has been recovered, adding their profile name, genuine name, profile picture, age, gender, participation statistics, etc.
While it is not illegal to learn users of social networking sites, failure to ensure this knowledge after it is collected poses a serious threat to affected users, as cybercriminals can use the data in the knowledge base to attack them online.
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