Several websites and Twitter accounts incorrectly attribute the 4 October Facebook outage to this alleged data leak.įurther Clarification: It’s alleged that the data was obtained by scraping publicly available data shared by users. Important Clarification: This is completely unrelated to the global Facebook outage experienced on 4 October 2021. Yesterday, several forum posters accused the seller of not delivering the promised data after payment. The seller commented they are willing to cooperate with the forum administrators to prove the data’s authenticity. Update – 5 October: The forum seller has today responded and denied the scam accusations, continuing to claim that the data is real. Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman, commented to Newsweek, “We’re investigating this claim and have sent a takedown request to the forum that’s advertising the alleged data.” It is possible the thread was taken down due to a request by Facebook: The forum poster and alleged seller, however, were not banned (usually what happens when scam allegations turn out to be true). Update – 6 October: The thread advertising the claimed data scrape has disappeared from the hacker forum. If authentic, this may constitute one of the biggest and most important Facebook data dumps. Now, this is where the mystery begins.The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users are allegedly being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally. The SocialArks’ data contained private phone numbers and email addresses of social media users, celebrities, and influencers that they do not reveal on their social platforms. However, people need to be careful about their information and the apps and sites that they allow to gather their data for ad targeting or other marketing purposes. While it is important to use social networks sensibly without giving out too much of your private information, it is still a vulnerable thing and basically fortifies the fact that if something ever goes online in the data cloud, it remains there and never gets deleted. The problem is that whenever data from social media is scraped, it is inadvertent that some of the sensitive information also gets leaked. ![]() Whatever activity these users were doing on their social platforms, some of that information was present in this database and it was all scrapped. An additional 55300000 Facebook profiles were also there but they were deleted after a little while when the exposed server was found out.Īll of this data included biographies, phone numbers, email addresses, the total number of followers, comments, most used hashtags, etc. Almost 81551567 profiles were from Facebook users. Out of 318 million total records, around 11651162 user profiles were collected from Instagram, while 66117839 profiles came from LinkedIn users. ![]() Hence, this was a violation of the guidelines of these social platforms too. While web-scraping is allowed to some extent, platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. The researchers found out that all the users’ data that was present on that server in the affected database was all scraped from various social media platforms. ![]() Researchers at Safety Detectives found the affected server, which is hosted by Tencent during a routine security check.Īs per the researchers, this server that got exposed on the internet without any security key, encryption, or passwords has all the data saved in segmented indices to save all the information from different social media sources. SocialArks’ owns a database called ElasticSearch, and this misconfigured database contained personally identifiable information of users from social media platforms. A Chinese data-management firm SocialArks’ proclaims itself to be a “cross-border social media management company that solves the problems of brand building, marketing, social customer management in China’s foreign trade sector.” This company has recently become a target of cybercrime when personal and public details of about more than 214 million social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn users, which may include celebrities, and influencers got leaked through a faulty database and server.
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