Recently, approximately 235 million Instagram and YouTube users’ data has been exposed under new data breach.
As per reports, social media users’ information such as contact information, names, images, and more were exposed and data was leaked.
Other information of users included different datasets of information like profile name, full name, images, age, gender, account description, profile statistics (Number of followers, Engagement rate, Follower growth rate, Audience gender, Audience age, Audience location, and Likes) to monitor engagement, and 20% of users’ numbers or email IDs. The data leaked can be used for scam and phishing purposes, which raises security conce
According to sources, the database comprised crapped data of users by a company called Deep Social.
Web scrapping is basically a way of collecting data from the web pages of various sites to form a database. The data collected is mainly public and through public profiles.
Through the practice of collecting data and forming a database is not a criminal offence, it invades privacy and is unacceptable widely.
Security firm Comparitech’s lead researcher Bob Diachenko has suggested that three similar copies of the database were found exposed till the 1st of August.
In regard to the allegations of data breach and hacking, Deep Social said, “Please, note that the negative connotation that the data has been hacked implies that the information was obtained surreptitiously. This is simply not true, all of the data is available freely to ANYONE with Internet access.”
However, the leaked data could be used for scam and phishing.
Hence users of aforementioned social media platforms are advised to change their passwords and keep their profile private as the data is already publicly available.
Comparitech also advised Instagram and Youtube users to be extra vigilant when it comes to potential scams or phishing attempts.
This is not the first time Deep Social has been alleged of data leak,the data scraping company was banned by Facebook and Instagram in 2018 for such reasons and was closed.
According to researchers, datasets containing Instagram data were named accounts-deepsocial-90 and accounts-deepsocial-91, following which the same company is expected to be behind the data breaching.
Stay tuned for further updates.
