"Millions of Social Profiles Leaked by Chinese Data-Scrapers"

Researchers at  Safety Detectives discovered a misconfigured ElasticSearch database owned by Chinese social-media management company SocialArks, which exposed 318 million records from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.  The records included 400GB of public and private profile data for 214 million social media users worldwide.  The research team determined that the leaked data's entirety was 'scraped' from social-media platforms, which is both unethical and a violation of Facebook's, Instagram's, and LinkedIn's terms of service.  The scraped 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 a few hours after the open server was discovered.  The public profile data included in the misconfigured database includes biographies, profile pictures, follower totals, location settings, contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers, number of followers, number of comments, frequently used hashtags, company names, employment position, and more.  Most data scraping is carried out legally by web developers, business intelligence analysts, and other businesses, but without adequate cybersecurity, then large data leaks affecting millions of people can occur.  

Threatpost reports: "Millions of Social Profiles Leaked by Chinese Data-Scrapers"