Millions of Social Profiles Leaked by Chinese Data-Scrapers

Millions of Social Profiles Leaked by Chinese Data-Scrapers

  • More than 400GB of public and private profile data for 214 million social-media users from around the world has been exposed to the internet – including details for celebrities and social-media influencers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
  • The leak stems from a misconfigured ElasticSearch database owned by Chinese social-media management company SocialArks, which contained personally identifiable information (PII) from users of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms.
  • The affected server, hosted by Tencent, was segmented into indices in order to store data obtained from each social-media source, which allowed researchers to look into the data further.
  • The scraped profiles included 11,651,162 Instagram user profiles; 66,117,839 LinkedIn user profiles; 81,551,567 Facebook user profiles; and 55,300,000 Facebook profiles that were deleted within a few hours after the open server was discovered.

– Tara Seals | January 11, 2021