Chinese social media management company Socialarks suffered a massive data leak, leading to the exposure of more than 400 GB of personal data, including several high-profile celebrities and social media influencers, revealed the Israeli-based research lab The Safety Detective on Monday.
According to Safety Detectives, which runs the world’s largest antivirus analysis website, Socialarks’ unprotected database contained personally identifiable information (PII) of at least 214 million social media users worldwide, using popular consumer platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as professional networks like LinkedIn.
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“The Elastic instance was discovered as part of the Security Detectives’ cybersecurity mission to discover online vulnerabilities that could pose risks to the general public,” wrote Jim Wilson, Security Researcher on the Security Detective’s research team. “As soon as the data owner is identified, our team informs the affected parties as quickly as possible to mitigate the risk of any cyber security breaches and server leaks.”
The Security Detectives team found that the ElasticSearch server was exposed publicly without password protection or encryption, during routine IP address checks on potentially unsafe databases.
“The lack of security apparatus on the company’s server meant that anyone in possession of the server’s IP address could access a database containing millions of people’s private information,” added Wilson.
According to Anurag Sen, head of the Security Detectives’ cyber security team, the affected database contained a “huge treasure trove” of 408 GB of confidential personal information and more than 318 million records in total.
The Safety Detectives research team was able to determine that all leaked data was “pulled” from social media platforms, which it highlighted as being unethical and a violation of Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn terms of service.
Socialarks suffered a similar data breach in August 2020, leading to the data exposure of 150 million users on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Socialarks is headquartered in Shenzhen and Xiamen and, according to the company, is a “cross-border social media management company dedicated to solving the current problems of brand building, marketing, marketing and managing social clients in the foreign trade industry. from China”.