SocialArks data breach has left over 200 million social media users' personal and professional …

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.SocialArks’ owns a database called ElasticSearch, and this misconfigured database contained personally identifiable information of users from social media platforms. Researchers at Safety Detectives found the affected server, which is hosted by Tencent during a routine security check. As 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.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. While web-scraping is allowed to some extent, platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. do not allow it. Hence, this was a violation of the guidelines of these…
Read More