Data leaked of 235 million users from Instagram, TikTok & YouTube in Dark Web: Reports

Netizens are often worried about their security because there have been any incidents noted in which hackers have preyed on many individuals and many companies. After a major Twitter hacking incident, again an eyebrow-raising incident has occurred where hackers have dumped data of more than 235 Million users from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube in the Dark Web. Read the details below.

How did the data of 235 Million users end up in Dark Web?

As per the reports by Deccan Herald, a popular company social media analytics company, Social Data was responsible for exposing legally influential social media users' data to marketing companies. The analytics company reportedly exposed data of millions of users from prominent social media companies like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. This happened because the organisation failed to provide any authentication process to access the database or set-up a password to shield the database. Some hackers got a hold on this data and they have now uploaded it on the Dark Web.

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What information did the stolen data from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube contain?

The data stolen from Social Data analytics company contained personal information. The list includes officially registered name, account description, username, whether the profile belongs to a business or has advertisements, statistics about follower engagement, including a number of followers, engagement rate, follower growth rate, audience gender, audience age, audience location, likes, last post timestamp, age and gender. It also includes some samples including email and phone numbers as well.

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How many users are exposed to the stolen data?

Comparitech cybersecurity team reportedly identified this incident immediately. As per Comparitech blog, user-profiles related to social media giants like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube  close to 235 million have been found in some undisclosed websites hosted at three separate IPv6 addresses.

However, the exposed data had links to the origin which belonged to the Deep Social. Deep Social's Application Programming Interface (API) was banned and sued by Facebook and Instagram in 2018 for fraudulently scraping user profiles. 

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Number of user data stolen as per the social media handle

• Instagram users - 192,392,954 exposed
• TikTok users - 42,129,799 exposed
• YouTube users - 3,955,892 exposed

Social Data is a legal analytics company that sells data of social media celebrities, connecting them with brands. However, if the personal information gets in the hands of hackers, it can be targetted to steal money from bank accounts or to make prank calls and even serious phishing scams.

To prevent such a breach from occurring, Comparitech cybersecurity team reached out to Deep Social to plug their security loophole and then provided Social Data with the information. The Chief Technology Officer of Social Data acknowledged the issue and closed the access door to the database.

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