Chinese hackers leaked 318 million Facebook , Instagram , and LinkedIn user profiles due to a misconfiguration of SocialArks ' cloud .
More than 214 million social media users around the world have been affected by the breach, including celebrities and influential people in the US and elsewhere.
A misconfiguration in the ElasticSearch owned by Chinese social media management company SocialArks allowed hackers to carry out this massive leak.
During a routine check, security researchers discovered the vulnerable server, which was publicly exposed without password protection or encryption. It contained a total of more than 318 million profiles.
SocialArks' data management platform is used for advertising and programmatic marketing.
The affected server , which was hosted by Tencent, was divided into indexes to store data received from each social media source
The leaked 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 hours of the discovery of the exposed server.
The personal information included in the profiles included biographies, photos, followers, location settings, contact information, email addresses and phone numbers, fan numbers, number of comments, frequently used hashtags, company names, job title, and more.
“The SocialArks database stores personal data for Instagram and LinkedIn users, such as private phone numbers and email addresses for users who do not disclose this information publicly on their accounts,” the researchers said. “How SocialArks could possibly have access to such data remains unknown… It remains unclear how the company managed to obtain private data from multiple secure sources… Furthermore, the company’s server had inadequate security and was left completely unprotected.”
The database was secured by SocialArks on the same day that security researchers notified the company of the issue.
